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A DIY guide: Swapping all 4 wheels & tyres of your car

20th November 2024, 13:03 by Deepankar Sadekar

With the first wheel, I realized when trying to undo the bolt nearest to the ground that I'd not jacked the car high enough.

BHPian supermax recently shared this with other enthusiasts:

I've written in the past about how we in Sweden (and other countries with colder climes) are expected to change from winter to summer tires and vice-versa, twice a year here

December 1st is the hard deadline to change to winter tires but if winter conditions arrive sooner than that, we are obligated to make the tire change earlier. In the past, I've left the task of changing the tires to various tire changing stations that spring up when it's time to swap tires. This time however, I decided to do it all myself, as I was already doing quite a bit of work in lugging the wheels out of my storage, loading them onto the car, paying a steep fee for the tire swap only to have to cart the wheels back home where I'd have to return them to storage. If I did the changing myself, I'd only have the extra task of changing the wheels myself, but would save myself around 5K INR as compensation for the additional labour, I thought.

Additional purchases/expenses:

A correct job of changing the wheels would mean torquing the wheelnuts to spec, which according to the manufacturer's instructions was 120 Nm. The tire changing crew have torque wrenches but also know very, very well by experience just how much to torque. Since I didn't have this experience, a torque wrench would be a must for me to get it right. A decent torque wrench that would do the job would set me back by the very same 5k INR that I'd save by doing the wheel swap on my own, but hey, this would be a one-time expense and the torque wrench would be in my collection of tools for a long time to come, so I went ahead and bought it.

D-Day:

When I checked the weather report for the week ahead on Sunday, the 17th of November, I saw that the temperatures were set to go sub-zero from Monday itself, and how! An amber alert for a snow storm had been issued for Wednesday! Unless I changed the wheels right away, my car would be illegal on the road and there are a lot of random checks by police to ensure that people are in compliance, as they don't want to see a spate of accidents caused by people who've been too lazy to change tires on time.

The plan:

Since I'd never done this before, I made a plan for the sequence in which I'd go about it. I'd already identified the jack points on my car and knew what to do to avoid damage to the car. The plan then was like this:

Loosen the wheelnuts by a quarter turn or so before jacking up the tires, to prevent unnecessary rocking of the car while jacked up.
Fetch the winter tires from the storage, check the tread depths with the depth checking tool, and double check the rotating direction to ensure that rights and lefts don't get mixed up.
Note the tread depths, use a chalk to mark the wheels their intended placements. The better tires go onto the back axle; this is a best-practice for safety for all kinds of cars irrespective of whether their are front or rear wheel driven (or AWD).
Jack up the car using the correct jack points.
Undo all bolts, including the special anti-theft bolt using the special remover head provided by the manufacturer.
Get the wheel off, note the position it came off from, and note its tread depth for the records.
Clean up the disk and surroundings of dust/rust particles.
Get the replacement wheel in place.
Bolt and tighten in a cross-pattern, i.e set in a bolt and half tighten it, install then the bolt that's diagonally opposite and do the same. Get all bolts in place in a similar pattern.
Use the torque wrench to torque the bolts to around 3/4th of the desired value, in my case, this would be 80 Nm, and follow the same cross pattern.
Torque the bolts up to spec (120 Nm).
Lower the car, repeat for the remaining wheels.
Once all the wheels were changed, use the compressor to pump in air into the tires and check and adjust the pressure with the high-precision Topeak digital pressure guage. 2.5 bar for the front tires and 2.6 for the ones in the rear.
Set the TPMS noting that all pressures were as they should be.

The execution:

The wheelnuts were the first challenge. They were stubbornly tight; my guess? They'd been overtightened by the 'experts'. When I realized that my arms were not strong enough to make the bolts budge, I angled the wheelnut remover parallel to the ground, and stepped on it and drove down steadily, applying even and increasing pressure with my foot, till the tool went down with a clunk. This did the trick, or at least for most of the bolts. Two bolts were still refusing to budge, and I had to back the car a few meters to change the angle on the nuts, so I got a better position with the tool, and that did it, but boy, the muscles in my leg were screaming in protest when I was done!

With the first wheel, I realized when trying to undo the bolt nearest to the ground that I'd not jacked the car high enough, as the tool would strike the ground. The tip while jacking up is therefore this; jack it up enough so that your tool doesn't strike the ground even when loosening/tightening the bolt closest to the ground. Another tip is to always ensure that no part of your body is ever under the vehicle, to prevent any unfortunate mishaps if anything happens to the jack, causing the car to come down. The bolts came away and the wheel did too, without much ado, but the winter tire was much heavier than the wheel that'd just come off, and I grunted in discomfort as I tried it vain to check that the holes lined up. I needed one hand and a foot to hold the heavy wheel in place while the other free hand held the wheelspanner. I put down the wheel and rang an SOS call to my wife, asking her to bring me my helmet-lamp, so I could see with little effort. This is my third tip to those of you who've not changed wheels before but need to; either do it in perfect lighting conditions, or else have a powerful helmet camera, so your hands are free to do other stuff while you get your operating area lit up. The rest went exactly to plan. I didn't time my first wheel change, but I took lesser and lesser time for each change. I timed myself for wheels 3 and 4, and they took 25 minutes and 19 minutes respectively. I should be able to bring this down to around 15 minutes per wheel without too much difficulty and without the need to cut any of my checklist items. It should therefore take an hour to actually change the wheels, but additional time is needed to check and set the tire pressures, fetch the wheels from the storage and to replace them after the job is done. All in all, it should be doable within 2.5 hours is my guess.

My final tip? Buy a set of work-overalls. They keep you warm even in a cold basement and can be used above other clothes if working outside in the cold. They have loads of pockets and slots for tools, and you don't have to worry about getting your clothes dirty no matter what you do.