Flat tire and what to do.

[richfaa]

A blow out is a "sudden and catostrophic failure" and no TPMS can protect against that. Most tire failures are caused by a slow loss of pressure and once the pressure has gone low enough the tire is off the rim and you have what appears to be a blowout damage and all. The fact is most blowout's are not blowouts but a loss of pressure that causes tire failure and the TPMS can warn of that and save the day. Had a piece of scrap metal the size of a silver dollar embed itself in the tir and the TMPS went off by the time we pulled over the tire was still in one piece but about to come off the rim but did no damage. Had we not been warned we would have had much damage.

Oh we can change a tire with one finger,,The one we use to dial 800-coach net.

[exav8tr]

I have changed three tires myself, two along the road (literally), coming from Alaska. I have always used a 12 ton bottle jack (maybe overkill, but does the job), and a couple blocks of wood UNDER THE FRAME NEAREST THE TIRE BEING CHANGED. For those of you with the MorRyde IS, you will need to lift the trailer a little farther as the wheel assembly will sit down when you remove the old tire (remember there is 5 inches of play in that assembly), and when you go to place the good one back on it will not fit, I was at the far range of my jack and had to get another jack to raise the assembly to get the good tire on the lugs. Also many folks, who are talented, will weld a U shaped iron piece on the bottle jack to fit around the frame. I am not talented, nor know how to weld, so I just use blocks of wood and be extra careful making sure no body part gets under there...

[RickW]

I carry a 12 ton bottle jack (paid something like $25 at Wal-Mart for it). I have both Coach-Net and road side assistance/towing thru my Insurance (Progressive). Typically I can change a flat and be back on the road before road side assistance even arrives.

I also carry a reflective safety vest. I put it on anytime I am forced to make a road side repair. I also have the advantage of having a air chuck on the truck so I also carry 50' air hose and impact wrench.

As other have pointed out I chalk the opposite side wheels. I jack up the trailer. Once the trailer is jacked up I also drop the landing gear and stabilizers. I have to crawl under the trailer to get the spare. I want as many points of contact with the ground as I can get before going under there.

Another tip we learned is if working on a tire on the road side have your spouse sit in the drivers seat. If a car does not seem to want to make a lane change have the spouse start to open the truck door as if they were going to get out. That seems to catch the attention of the idiot who is not going to change lanes and about 90% of the time they will make a quick, last minute lane change.

Last if you do not already have a TPMS, I highly advise getting one. In most cases it will alert you of a problem with enough time to find a safe place to pull over at before damage is done to the trailer. Every tire we have had with the TPMS it notified us of dropping pressure in the tire before the tire came apart. In each case when I got out of the truck I could hear the air escaping from the tire.

[snfexpress]

I've not done this, but our dealer routinely, to work on the rear axles, tires, etc., lowers the front landing gear, putting the nose closer to the ground and elevating the rear. They then put jack stands under the frame behind the rear wheels and raised the front end. The result is that the wheels are off the ground - all four.

[richfaa]

Anothet vote for coach net road service.

[snfexpress]

Or, Rich, you can get the Level Up when you order your new Monty...

[Bill-N-Donna]

I plan on getting a tire monitor system, hopefully in the not too distant future. After experiencing a bad tire or whatever and knowing that you can in fact drive and continue driving on one tire without knowing it for who knows how long? I figure something needs to bring my attention to the tires if one of them fails. I like how the tire monitor system works. I also had someone drive up beside me trying to warn me about a bad tire.

I guess it shows how smooth these rigs can really be; not to be able to notice a bad tire when you lose one!

[snfexpress]

It happened to us. We had never had a catastrophic tire failure before in our 5 years of fulltiming. Our Prodigy brake controller displayed a short but we felt nothing. It was raining cats and dogs so I was reluctant to pull over and then our brake controller showed the normal connection. What we didn't know was that a tire had wrapped itself around the axle. Some passersby alerted us to the problem and we pulled over to contemplate the problem...