Ray McCune's Website

One incredibly bad experience

The picture to the left is the first in a series on having morons work on your vehicle. I took my motor home in to have the tires replaced. As near as I can tell they had 5000 miles on them, maybe less, and this is what the tire on the left rear did. Now the old fellow I bought the motor home from, had told me about efforts he had undertaken to get a reasonable ride he decided to get new tires and traded in his Michelin Tires for an unbranded set, that had a" life time warantee", in California from the original dealer, of course this wasn't going to do me any good, and I really wished he had left the Michelins on it. The original tires would have had 50,000 miles on them and still have given me less trouble. I had a flat on the trip home, small screw, which cost me $30.00 to get repaired only because I took the tire and rim somewhere I knew the folks working on it.

 

 

 

The next picture is what the geniuses did to the wheel simulators while trying to change the tires. Now they seem to have changed all the tires and so far as I know they all hold air well, which could be even a bigger annoyance. But they were exceptional in their ignorance about wheel simulators.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The gorrillas that are employed in this fine establishment are special, but not real bright or well trained. But if they don't have something resembling this tool don't let them near your truck. Otherwise it's a screw driver that will be used to pry the removeable wheel caps off. And the result of that is, a scratched up and dented wheel simulator like mine. Take a look.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oops I guess the only good picture I have is after they tried to GLUE the caps in a place that resembled "we didn't do the dumbest thing possible and screw the crimped caps off your wheels because we are so stupid as to not know which are the removable caps,,,DUHHHH!" Well I am as smart as they are stupid. So when they screwed it up i figured out how to fix it. And I'm going to show you how.

 

 

First make sure the morons don't throw away the evidence and claim it was gone when they got it. Second hope that unlike my morons they haven't attempted to glue things together so that they are slung off before you get home, thereby appearing to not be the fault of the tire manglers, and not available to be reinserted. The wheels I have are stainless steel so they didn't crack the chrome or stretch the wheels punched holes when they used the power wrenches to screw the stainless steel caps off the stainless steel wheel simulator.

The small groove, here seen full of glue, is what holds the cap on. First I had to scrape the glue out of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I used a file to cut two {180 degree apart} notches in the cap. The notches were originally at an angle but I found out they worked just as well squared out which was easier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also filed little square notches in the simulators.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then I set the caps in a socket on an extension held in the vise in my garage. I then lined them up and twisted the edges/ corners of them a little so they engaged and rotated the simulator around the cap. Unfortunately as I was doing this alone I couldn't get a picture of the simulator rotating around the cap. But it actually worked just like putting the cap on a bottle, but sort of backwards, so I guess more like putting a bottle on a cap.

 

 

 

 

 

After the operation it looked like this, the streaks are the remnants of the glue used to try to cover up their stupidity. But as it's inside and will never show, I just left it as a reminder . Maybe I'm lazy, Ok, I'm lazy.