Servicing Split Rims
After close to sixty years of working with, driving, rebuilding and repairing trucks and equipment, including several hundred military vehicles, I’ve heard many legends, stories, and myths that go with the territory. As far as stories, there’s the one about four American soldiers in Vietnam who were driving along a narrow trail through rice paddies in an M151 when they suddenly came under enemy fire. There was no cover, no place wide enough to turn around and retreat, but the GI’s jumped out, each grabbed a corner of the MUTT, and they lifted and turned it around. As the story goes, when they arrived back at base and told of their escape no one believed them — “four men cannot lift an M151.” And, when they tried to duplicate this feat, they couldn’t!
I have no problem believing this, because there are many documented cases of mothers lifting massive objects like overturned cars or fallen trees to rescue their children.
In regard to legends, who hasn’t heard the one about “brand-new WWII jeeps in boxes for sale at $500 each?” It used to be $50 when I was a kid, but we’ll allow for inflation.
Many of us have also heard of someone who got their head ripped off when a split-rim tire they were changing blew its ring. This has perpetuated an unreasonable fear of split-rim wheels, which amounts to outright terror of multi-piece wheels for some folks.
This story is true… it has happened many times, and ironically often to experienced professionals who work on such wheels for a living. Why do these accidents happen to professionals?
Logic suggests the odds are much higher — repeated walks through a mine field are much more likely to end in disaster than a single foray — but constant repetition of any task can lead to eventual carelessness when performing it.
For example, in the six years I drove an eighteen-wheeler, I never once saw a split-rim tire put in a safety cage at any truck stop, even though there were such cages on site. Most of the time, the tire-jockey used an ordinary air-chuck instead of a clamp-on type. Some actually stood or even sat on the tire as he inflated it.
On the other hand, I have demounted and re-mounted hundreds of split-rim wheels of all sizes, starting when I was thirteen, from ordinary civilian style 7:50
