Changing a Tyre on a 1929 Chevrolet
Changing a tyre on a 1929 Chevrolet is part mechanical skill, part patience and part negotiation with nearly 100-year-old steel. Using an original Atlas rim tool, we look at how it was done — and why the process might cause a modern workplace safety department to have a collective nervous breakdown.
There are two types of people in this world.
Those who think changing a tyre is a mildly inconvenient five-minute interruption involving a cordless rattle gun, and those who have met a 1929 Chevrolet rim in a bad mood.
The latter know that it is not simply a tyre change. It is more of a negotiation with nearly 100-year-old American steel, steel designed in an era when men wore hats to work and, if they had any sense, read the instruction manual that came with the vehicle to learn how the tools were meant to be used.
Those who didn’t read it possibly lost a finger as a rather permanent reminder to pay attention.
And if you get careless with one of these old rims, it can still bite.
There is no compressor whining in the background, no pneumatic bead breaker and certainly no helpful bloke on YouTube explaining the procedure while reminding you to like and subscribe.
There is just you, a tyre, a length of stubborn American iron and an Atlas or Hercules rim tool that looks less like precision workshop equipment and more like something borrowed from a medieval dentist.
The wonderfully agricultural-looking Atlas rim tool uses mechanical advantage to collapse the Chevrolet’s demountable rim sufficiently to remove it from the tyre.
On my 1929 Chevrolet, the demountable rim is designed so it can be collapsed sufficiently to remove it from the tyre. It is a wonderfully clever bit of engineering, but it also involves steel held under tension, which means this is one of those jobs where knowing what you are doing matters considerably more than enthusiasm.
Before tackling an old rim, it needs to be completely deflated and the rim itself inspected for damage, distortion and serious corrosion. If you don’t understand the system or have any doubt about its condition, find somebody experienced with vintage wheels.
Nearly a century of rust is not a recognised engineering tolerance.
1: Break the Tyre Down
Before doing anything with the rim, the tyre bead has to be freed.
Lay the wheel flat and work the bead loose from the rim using tyre levers. In a workshop, this might have been done against a post or with some form of manual bead breaker.
Out on the road, the equipment list was generally rather more concise.
A boot. A bar. And sheer determination.
Once the bead has been broken on both sides, the tyre should be able to move independently of the rim.
This is progress. It may not look like progress, but with machinery designed before television was invented, you learn to adjust your expectations.
The wonderfully agricultural-looking Atlas rim tool uses mechanical advantage to collapse the Chevrolet’s demountable rim sufficiently to remove it from the tyre.
2: Find the Split and Locking Section
Every demountable rim has a starting point, and this is it.
Rotate the wheel until you locate the split in the rim and the locking section that prevents it moving when assembled.
Clean the area before going any further.
Rust, dirt and 90-odd years of accumulated agricultural archaeology are not helpful when you are trying to see how something fits together.
This is also the point where you stop attacking things with progressively larger hammers and actually look at what the engineers intended.
A surprisingly useful mechanical technique.
3: Relieve the Rim Tension
Now the Atlas or Hercules rim tool earns its place in the toolbox.
An original Atlas rim tool positioned inside a vintage wheel rim, showing the simple but ingenious mechanical system used to open and close split rims on vehicles such as a 1929 Chevrolet.
Position the tool securely across the rim and begin winding the screw carefully.
The objective is not brute force.
You are simply taking enough load from the split section to allow the rim to begin collapsing in a controlled manner.
This is the clever part of the system.
Rather than wrestling an immovable tyre from an equally immovable rim until somebody loses either patience or skin, the tool changes the diameter of the rim itself.
Mechanical advantage. Archimedes would have approved. Although he probably would have demanded a longer lever.
4: Open the Split
With the tension relieved, the split can be carefully opened at the locking section using a suitable tyre lever or bar.
Carefully is the important word here.
This is not the moment to summon your inner excavator operator and start levering on things until something goes bang. You are guiding the rim, not fighting it. Let the rim tool carry the load.
Once the split starts moving, the tool can be repositioned as required so the rim continues collapsing evenly.
If everything is behaving itself, continue.
If something is binding, twisting or making a noise normally associated with collapsing bridges, stop and work out why.
5: Collapse the Rim
Wind the tool in further and the rim begins drawing in on itself.
The three-legged Atlas or Hercules arrangement reduces the rim’s effective diameter just enough for it to clear the tyre casing.
This is the moment when the genius of the old system becomes obvious.
You haven’t made the tyre bigger. You have made the wheel smaller.
Admittedly only temporarily, otherwise Chevrolet may have stumbled across the collapsible spare wheel about 80 years before anyone else.
Keep the tool square and the tension controlled. If the rim starts binding, back it off and reset.
There are very few mechanical problems improved by becoming angry with them.
The original Atlas Rim Tool instructions explain exactly how the collapsible demountable rim was opened, shrunk and refitted — proving that reading the manual was a fairly useful idea even in the 1920s.
6: Walk the Rim Out of the Tyre
Once sufficiently collapsed, the rim can be worked out through the tyre.
It does not simply lift straight out.
Instead, you progressively walk it around, freeing one section and then another until the rim effectively spirals its way from the tyre casing.
Done properly, it is surprisingly civilised.
Done badly, it becomes another practical demonstration of why mechanics eventually invented swear jars.
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Remove the Tube and Flap
With the rim removed, the tube and flap can finally come out for inspection, repair or replacement.
And in the 1920s and ’30s, this was often the whole reason for dismantling everything in the first place.
A nail through the tyre did not mean ringing roadside assistance and tracking the bloke on an app while he drove towards you.
You fixed it. Then you continued driving.
Refitting
Refitting follows much the same logic in reverse.
The rim is introduced back into the tyre at an angle and collapsed sufficiently with the rim tool to allow it to sit correctly inside the casing.
The split is then brought back together under controlled tension and the locking section correctly engaged.
Everything needs to be properly seated and aligned before inflation.
This is not the stage for thinking, “That’ll probably do.”
Steel under tension has never been particularly receptive to optimism.
A Brief Word on Modern Safety Culture
Now imagine, just for a moment, rolling into a modern mine site or major transport depot in your 1929 Chevrolet.
You’ve arrived to make a small delivery. It is, after all, a small truck.
Then you discover you have a flat tyre.
Your natural reaction is to wander around to the toolbox, pull out the screw jack and casually retrieve your Atlas rim tool.
Immediately, somewhere in the organisation, a disturbance would be felt in the force.
Because what you have just produced from beneath the seat is essentially a three-legged finger-jamming contraption fitted with exposed gears and enough mechanical leverage to make a workplace safety adviser spill his almond latte.
Sirens would sound. White dual-cab utes would appear from every direction.
Within minutes your Chevrolet would be surrounded by enough orange witches’ hats to close a major section of the Hume Highway.
Meanwhile, in offices in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth, inboxes would begin pinging.
A 1929 Chevrolet tyre change meets the modern workplace: one mechanic, one flat tyre and enough witches’ hats to temporarily close the Hume Highway.
URGENT: LEGACY MECHANICAL HAZARD IDENTIFIED.
Then would come the meeting invitations.
An incident number.
A risk matrix.
A laminated flow chart.
Someone would take a photograph of the exposed gears, import it into PowerPoint and circle them in red as though they had just discovered weapons-grade plutonium in your toolbox.
Questions would follow.
Has the tool been tagged?
Where is the guarding?
Who authorised its use?
Has the operator completed the online training module?
Where is the guarding for the guarding?
Has anyone undertaken a dynamic interaction hazard assessment relating to potential digit interface outcomes?
By smoko there would be a draft procedure.
By lunchtime, a working group.
By three o’clock, a toolbox meeting.
And before knock-off, a twelve-page Safe Work Method Statement would have appeared requiring three signatures, two spotters, a QR code and somebody from head office to fly in next Tuesday.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, somebody would inevitably ask whether WorkSafe needs to be notified.
Meanwhile, the Chevrolet would still have a flat tyre.
Which is amusing when you consider that generations of mechanics and drivers used tools like the Atlas and Hercules successfully because they understood a rather important principle that tends to become lost underneath modern layers of paperwork.
Respect the machinery.
These tools have exposed gears.
Put your fingers in the wrong place and they will object.
The rim contains stored energy.
Ignore that and it may object even more enthusiastically.
But when the equipment is in sound condition, the tyre is completely deflated and the person using it understands how the system works, the process is controlled and remarkably ingenious.
That’s the distinction.
Common sense should never mean ignoring a genuine hazard.
But neither should managing a hazard automatically require turning a simple mechanical operation into the administrative equivalent of launching the Space Shuttle.
There must surely be some territory remaining between recklessness and requiring a committee to approve the use of a tyre lever.
Roadtrains.com.au editor Howard Shanks with the 1929 Chevrolet — nearly a century separating the truck from most of the tools found in a modern workshop.
The Reality of It
Changing a tyre on a 1929 Chevrolet is wonderfully mechanical.
There is no noise from an air compressor.
No hydraulics. No electronics. No battery percentage indicator blinking accusingly at you.
Just steel, a screw thread, mechanical advantage and somebody who understands what happens when metal is put under load.
The Atlas and Hercules tools did not make the job effortless.
They made it possible.
And there is something deeply satisfying about watching a tool designed nearly a century ago still perform exactly the job its designer intended.
No software updates. No subscription. No Bluetooth connection.
No message telling you the Atlas app is no longer compatible with your operating system.
Just wind the handle. Watch the rim move. Understand what the metal is doing.
And keep your fingers somewhere sensible.
Because after almost 100 years, that remains one workplace safety procedure even I am prepared to endorse.
