Air regulator question.

[tommu56]

Darren
What about multiple regulators one for each tire you fill after braking my wrist mounting a trailer tire I air them from a good distance or use a cage!

tommu56

 

[SPYDERLK]

Here is what I thnk will work. It is a combination of several good ideas that I have seen on the thread.

Put a T @ the air chuck. Off the side port of the T put a small ball valve and an adjustable poppet valve. Adjust the poppet to about 100PSI or a little more. Only after you start filling the tire do you open the valve to the poppet. The pressure at the poppet will be less than compressor pressure due to the flow losses. As the tire fills, flow will slow and the pressure at the poppet will increase til it pops off. With a little tuning you should be able to balance this so that it happens pretty close to 90psi tire pressure.
larry

 

[Darren]

Thanks guys. I think there's an answer in these messages. The shop compressor is on the small side. I usually lay out six to ten tires and fill each in turn while I stuff tubes and liners in the next batch. I'm not comfortable filling more than one at a time because the rings do come off at times even though the lock rings are new. I need to eyeball them, from a distance, until the bead seats. If they blow off, that's usually around 20 psi when there's a problem with the notch in the rim. As long as the lock ring seats there are no problems. Sometimes I just have to do a little persuading.

 

[DieselPower]

If your doing split ring rims I would highly suggest either buying or building a tire inflation cage. I have seen what a ring can do to a person, it ain't pretty.

 

[Darren]

I'm sure an unnamed agency would have conniption fits over the way the tires are mounted. Using a cage would make it a much more difficult task and result in more "incidents." With the tire flat on the floor, the rings go straight up if they blow. If the bead doesn't rise uniformly all the way around, you need to whack the safety/flat ring with a hammer to nudge it. That jars the safety ring up which wedges the lock ring into the rim notch. It's obvious which rim/ring combo is going to be a problem. If there's a hint of a problem I disconnect the air line from the header, not the tire, and let the tire bleed out and go back to square one after removing the rings.

I don't stick any body part in harms way until I've verified that the lock ring is seated in the notches on both the safety ring and the rim. When that happens the lock/split ring is caged. The factor which makes a difference is that we only use new lock rings and the rim and safety ring have both been blasted and painted so you're not dealing with rust which complicates things.

Keep in mind, I'm also using new tires. I'd be more worried about trying to mount a used tire. In that case I'd insist on a cage in case the tire failed catastrophically.

 

[Bird]

If your doing split ring rims I would highly suggest either buying or building a tire inflation cage. I have seen what a ring can do to a person, it ain't pretty.

I repaired both split rim and split ring tires without a cage when I was a teenager in my dad's service stations. Like Darren said, I watched them carefully, used a hammer to tap things into place when necessary, etc. We didn't have cages, so we did the work anyway, as carefully as possible. And luckily we never had an accident. But now . . . now way would I mess with one without a cage. A few years ago, one of my brothers was working on RVs and had mounted a new tire on a big motorhome wheel. The company he was working for had just gotten a new cage, but had not yet bolted the cage down to the floor. So my brother had the tire in the cage with the cage sitting against the wall. It was a freak accident and was later determined (even by the tire manufacturer) to be a tire manufacturing defect, but the tire was supposed to be inflated to 80 psi and at about 70 psi, the tire itself blew. That blew the cage away from the wall into my brother, knocked him backwards across the shop so his head hit the concrete floor and they sent him, unconscious, to the hospital in an ambulance. Fortunately, it was only a minor concussion and no serious injury.