I consider myself to be pretty self-sufficient. I don’t pretend to know a lot about car mechanics, but I was pretty sure I knew how to change a tire (in theory), until last Friday night I found myself stranded near Loyola with three friends and a flat.
I thought when I had to say goodbye to my beautiful black Ford Escape at the end of its lease (I miss you Victoria), I was out of the woods when it came to car troubles. Wrong. Standing on the curb in the cold I realized that my over-protective father had actually never showed me how to change a tire. I figured ‘hey we go to Northwestern how hard could this be?’ Hard. So to spare you from what quickly turned into a bad “How many sorority girls does it take to _________?” joke, here’s what it takes to change a tire the right way.
First, pull off the road into a well lit area, and make sure you’re not on an incline – the car could fall on you. Next, pop the trunk and find your spare. So far so good?
Now we come to the part that you may not know. You have to crack the bolts – basically this means loosen them just slightly before you jack the car up, which will make them easier to take off once you have the jack in place. We didn’t know that, which caused all sorts of trouble, but more on that later.
Now, if you’ve managed this, you’re ready to jack the car up, but you can’t just stick it anywhere in the under carriage. Again, we didn’t know this and placed the jack under the plastic part of the running-board – which resulted in a very sharp cracking noise after only a few cranks. Oops. Make sure the top of the jack is placed on solid metal.
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Now you get to turn, And ladies, this is not as easy as it looks. We gave this job to my friend Sarah – she’s a bit of a gym freak and has some pretty impressive guns. It took her almost a half an hour and she was sore for days.
Now that you’ve got the car in the air it’s time to actually take off the tire. Here’s where we ran into a major problem. We hadn’t cracked the bolts before we jacked the car up (not that I’m sure this would have even made a difference in taking them off — these suckers were rusted on). Just as we were about to give up and have the car towed, a very nice (and somewhat hefty) man offered his services. He literally had to put his full weight on the tire iron and jump on it to get the bolts to loosen.
After that godsend we were left with the actual changing of the tire. I don’t know if any of you have ever lifted a tire, but they are heavy, even the donut spares. In the end, it really did take four sorority girls to lift off the flat and hold the spare in place while screwing in and tightening the bolts.
The lesson here? Read this article, make friends with someone with either a) super-human wrenching strength or b) a long-lasting love affair with Five Guys, and you too can successfully change a tire all by yourself … almost.