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2018 BMW R1200GS RALLYE
2018 DCT Tour
2018 BMW R1200GS RALLYE
2018 BMW R1200GS RALLYE
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Raphael Orlove
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Gif: Reddit’s r/WCGW
Was 2021 a great year? Not exactly! But we did have some posts that did good traffic. Take a walk down memory lane with us, as we think back on 2021, a year that will seem much better by this time in 2022.
The internet is awash with people using a spritz or two of brake cleaner or starter fluid to bang set a bead on a tire. As you can see above, there’s a right way and a wrong way.
Getting a tire to mount right on a rim can be a challenge. Hell, I spent a week trying to mount my first tubeless mountain bike tires a few months back and found a lot of the same tips and tricks being used there as you find in the four-wheeled off road and stance car scenes.
The central problem is you want a tire to press right on up to the inside lip of the rim and kind of lock in place. Tires have a kind of raised edge right at the inside lip, and rims have a raised edge, too, on the inside of their outer edge. As you inflate the tire, its bead pushes out to the edge of the rim and forms its airtight seal.
This is called “setting the bead,” and usually it’s a pretty easy job both on a bike or a car tire. Pumping up the tire with air is usually enough to set the bead on anything ordinary, and if it’s tough, slightly overfilling the tire with air will get you the pop ... pop ... ping! of the bead seating. Amazingly, I dug up some fantastically low-res images on government websites that I am free to use to illustrate my point.
Here you can see a fueleconomy.gov diagram of a car tire, with its lipped bead:
Illustration: FuelEconomy.gov
And here is how that bead seats into a rim, as seen in a NHTSA cutaway:
Photo: NHTSA
Sometimes, though, a tough tire on a wide rim will not quite want to work its way to the bead. This is why you see people lubricating the bead with soapy water when mounting a tire.
It’s also why you see some people (particularly those in the off-roading world) use a ratchet strap to help set a bead. The idea in this case is to press the tire down and out towards the lip of the rim, doing some of the work for you before you start trying to blast air into the tire.
Here’s an example:
And here’s a more low-tech example on a small tractor tire using a rope:
Both of these methods help you out if you don’t have a giant air compressor to get a huge blast of air in to really pop in a tricky bead. But what else gives you a big blast of air pressure? An explosion! This is the fundamental theory of using fire to set a bead. There really isn’t that much fuel needed to get even a pretty big tire to set its bead, as seen here on a Jeep:
You see the same technique in the world of stance cars fairly often, as people try and mount tires on wider and wider wheels. Even a pretty normal tire will need some help to stretch out and meet the lip of the rim. Here’s Hoonigan doing it with a strong “don’t try this at home” warning a few years back:
Car And Driver also has its own step-by-step guide to using fire to set a bead while out in the field, with similar intonations not to do this. As someone who grew up in California and had to live through many a smoke-filled summer from wildfires, I, too, would not encourage anyone to do this while in a dry field or pine forest they happen to be Jeep’ing through.
As you can see in the videos, not a ton of combustable fluid is at hand. Too much of an explosion and you risk not just inflating the tire enough to set the bead, but enough to blow out the tire altogether.
That’s exactly what happens in this video uploaded to Reddit’s terrifying What Could Go Wrong subreddit. The video itself is overflowing with wonderful Brazilian energy, and every word in Portuguese uttered is dripping with confidence, even as the guy dumps basically a full Mountain Dew’s worth of gas into this tractor tire:
17,655 votes and 571 comments so far on Reddit
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I apologize that I can’t embed the video, as our CMS isn’t quite as friendly to my old hacks that would get anything in here. I do encourage you to click the link above and watch the video.
The best I can do otherwise is give you a frame-by-frame.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
Let us first enjoy the optimism presented here.
What could go wrong, indeed!
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
A key element of this process is to slap the tire first, patting it as you would a horse.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
Here we can see a truly large volume of combustable liquid going into the tire. How much liquid? Too much.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
The guys hook up air to the tire — fire might set the bead, but this air is meant to keep it set and filled with air. Our hero in the blue jeans is making a safety trail of fluid that could have been longer, honestly. A few hundred feet would have been comfortable for me.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
Our second and only other safety measure is to use a lit rag on a stick to set things off. Ear protection? Nah. Eye protection? Nah. Rag on a stick! You’re good, bud.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
Here, for just a moment, we see that this actually worked! The bead, as you can see in this frame, is set. Look at how snug that giant tire is to the bead.
Perfection.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
And just one frame later, our failure is more than present. The explosion of the tire blowing out is enough to distort reality. Our protagonist has turned wiggly. I would not want to be an ear drum anywhere near this.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
Here, also, is a good view of the tire itself blowing out. You can have too much of a good thing.
Screenshot: Reddit’s r/WCGW
And here is our aftermath. The bead is not set, the tire is on fire, and the windows on the tractor are trash. We have now entered into a new calculus of wondering — would it have taken less time to set this bead using a non-explosive method than it will take now to fix the broken glass on this John Deere? We may never know.
Photo: AvtoVzglyad
Anti-puncture sealants are quite densely settled in the trunks of motorists.
Their convenience is that in a matter of minutes this liquid from a can can solve a huge problem - to repair a puncture in a wheel without dismantling. But is “anti-puncture” so universal? The AutoView portal found out when magic does not help, and can even harm.
Efim Rozkin
"Thank you" for the appearance of a liquid for the quick repair of punctured wheels, as in most cases, with all sorts of useful technologies, I must say to the military. First of all, "anti-puncture" was invented to quickly repair the wheels of military equipment in combat conditions, when delay becomes unsafe. The magic liquid is poured into whole tires in advance, where it simply dangles, waiting in the wings. In the event of a breakdown of the wheel, the agent finds the puncture site, and, having fixed on its walls, hardens. In this way, damage up to 6 mm in diameter can be repaired.
In general, the military could not contain their joy, and, as in the case of WiFi, Bluetooth and other once-secret technologies, they shared an “anti-puncture” with civilians.
And now it is one of the most popular means of quickly repairing wounded tires. It got to the point that some automakers, in order to save money, began to equip their cars with an anti-puncture spray, instead of putting at least a “stowaway” in the trunk.
So, let's summarize: “anti-puncture” is a means of preventive protection. However, today there are liquids that can be filled not in advance, but immediately after the breakdown of the wheel. These are universal compositions from a series of two in one. But, be that as it may, they have the same goals and principle of operation - to effectively repair a punctured wheel. And here it is important to understand when the use of such liquids is justified, and when it can be harmful.
Photo from open sources
First, you need to understand that an excess of such sealant will introduce an imbalance in the wheel. There will be vibrations, hum. The lack of liquid will not bring any benefit or harm. You need to pour exactly as much as recommended by the manufacturer.
Then pump up the punctured wheel, and drive a couple of kilometers at speeds up to 80 km / h so that the sealant is evenly distributed over the inside of the wheel, detects a puncture and seals it. And here motorists make the second mistake.
It must be remembered that “anti-puncture” is a temporary measure. In other words, such sealants are designed for a short period of work, so that you have enough time to get to the nearest tire shop and carry out a full tire repair. Otherwise, the plug formed by the sealant will let you down at the most inopportune moment. And the consequences can be fatal. Therefore, after using the “anti-puncture”, you should visit the tire center as soon as possible, where it is necessary to clean the inner surface of the wheel from sealant residues, and repair the hole using traditional tire repair technologies.
It is also worth remembering that the anti-puncture sealant perfectly copes with wheel holes on the working surface - on the tire sole.
But it does not work at all with side breakdowns, and even more so with cuts.
It is best to carry a repair kit with a harness. This repair method is much more reliable, and takes about the same amount of time. Yes, and such a kit costs a mere penny.
Testing the Japanese dude in Russian directions
16913
We experience the Japanese pijon in Russian directions
16913
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Are you plagued by a whole host of winter problems - a cold seat, frost on the windows, a slightly lively starter and hardened shock absorbers? You will look at winter with different eyes, having learned what it was like for drivers in the Far North in the era of wooden cabins and the absence of antifreeze.
To make it clearer what we are talking about: no matter how primitive cars were in the middle of the last century, they drove not only in the habitable regions of the USSR, but also in places where a human foot rarely set foot. There were quite a few such territories in the vast country, and these were primarily cold regions - Siberia, the Far North, the Arctic ...
In general, it is worth noting that 53% of the territory of the Land of Soviets were regions where the average daily temperature in January was in the range from -20 °C to -50 °C. So there was simply no choice left: the territories had to be developed, which means that people and goods had to be transported across them.
To talk about the difficulties of operating vehicles at abnormally low temperatures, you need to understand that their essence is not only the problem of the morning start.
Everything is much worse: in extreme frost, some units cannot work in principle - even in the morning, even in the midst of a work shift.
For example, even at minus 20 °C, some even modern grades of rubber “tan” so much that parts from them become covered with a network of cracks, and at minus 40 °C, the so-called glass transition occurs - crystallization of rubber, which leads to the destruction of the part when applied to her load. Therefore, the tires on workhorses ZIS and YaAZ, after a particularly frosty night, could suddenly turn out to be, to put it mildly, out of round.
Why rubber - carbon steel already at minus 30-40 ° C sharply loses its resistance to shock loads. At the same minus 40–45 ° С, steels with manganese and silicon additives (and these are springs and springs) become brittle, cast iron (cylinder head, transmission housings) reduces impact strength, and solder, which is used to solder electrical equipment and electronic components, as if by magic turns into powder, crumbling from wiring and printed circuit boards ...
On some old diesel engines, connecting rod bearings made of lead bronze were used - so even at minus 20 ° C they deformed so much that they wedged the crankshaft and left burrs on its necks.
Add some more frost-related nuances here. For example, the wind, which already at 10-15 m/s significantly accelerates the cooling of the units - and in fact, in some regions of the North, even 25-40 m/s is not uncommon! Or the smallest snow dust, penetrating into a blizzard through the most reliable seals and damaging the mechanisms. Therefore, special methods of exploitation were required for drivers-northerners at every turn.
We started producing special winter oils by the mid-1960s, but they were not even seen at most car depots at that time. Many have also heard or read about antifreezes for cooling systems in smart books, but even if they suddenly appeared at the disposal of all motorcades, their use on the northern technology of that time would be difficult. And we will now explain why.
A standard car of the early 1960s (we are talking primarily about trucks, since no one rode Moskvich and Pobeda in the Far North) confidently started in frost no lower than minus 10-15 ° С.
In colder weather, ordinary, non-winter oil turned into a thick porridge, increasing its viscosity by 700 times! Therefore, to crank the crankshaft faster than 50 times per minute, an icy starter with a frosted battery could not. And this was not enough to start the engine.
Moreover, the common automobile gasolines A-66 and A-70, which were used by the main trucks of the North - all-wheel drive ZIS-151, ZIL-157, GAZ-63 - also ceased to fully evaporate already at minus 15 ° C.
In the photo: ZIS-151Therefore, in frosts below minus 20 ° C, the engines of that time needed to be warmed up before starting. There were several options, but they all required a preliminary (in the evening) draining of the coolant from the engine. In the conditions of well-equipped stationary bases, low-pressure steam supplied to the cooling jacket was used for preheating. During 10-15 minutes of such a “purging”, the frozen engine gained the temperature necessary for starting.
In primitive base points, the engine was heated by pouring hot water through its cooling jacket: some five to ten buckets of boiling water - and your Lawn can be started! True, before that, you need to make sure that the water is hot enough, because if it freezes in the exhaust tap, it will be a disaster: the entire portion of water in the block will immediately turn into ice, and the engine will mercilessly burst with pressure.
Yes, we have not yet said that the oil should also be drained from the evening so that it can be warmed up to plus 9 in the morning0 ° C, pour into the motor to warm up the crankshaft bearings, and to facilitate the operation of the starter too.
Actually, and not only for this. Another surprise that winter could bring if the driver suddenly managed to start the engine with frozen grease in the sump was damage to the elements of the lubrication system due to abnormally high pressure: squeezing out plugs, broken hoses, and deformation of radiators.
Lazy drivers, who did not want to drain the oil and in the morning bother with heating it and refilling it, poured a good portion of gasoline (up to 20% of the oil amount) into the crankcase (directly into the oil) before putting the hot car up for the night. B-70 brand aviation gasoline was officially recommended, since it evaporated faster from the crankcase after starting the engine (about 25 minutes) and had less effect on its wear.
Drivers of YaAZs, MAZs and KrAZs with diesel engines (they were all equipped with YaAZ engines at that time) boldly diluted their oil with kerosene, at thirty-degree frosts the proportion of the mixture could reach 50:50.
Over time, starting heaters, which began to appear on serial vehicles just in the mid-1960s, seriously facilitated the work of drivers. It was something similar to the current "autonomous" type of Webasto - gasoline (or "solar") boilers that heat the coolant of the engine cooling system. The heater boiler was built into the cooling system circuit, so it finally became possible to use non-freezing liquids in it in addition to water - after all, now in the evenings it was not necessary to “drain the water” in order to repeatedly pour boiling water into the engine in the morning to warm it up.
Engine preheater Another not forgotten simplified version to this day for not particularly severe frosts is flammable liquids that are injected into the intake manifold using simple devices.
The liquid containing volatile ether is supplied in disposable metal capsules that are charged into a mechanical pump.
“Morning never happens to be good” — this proverb must have been invented by Northern drivers. Indeed, in the old days, every day before the start of the shift, they had to do additional hard work in the “fresh air”.
So, what we do today at any temperature with a slight turn of the key in the ignition or by pressing the Start button, some half a century ago for a driver from Surgut, Syktyvkar, Magadan or Arkhangelsk looked like a whole range of preparatory work, for which I wanted to get special pay. Every morning began with the algorithm:
But even when the engine finally began to work confidently at medium speeds, the driver could not immediately go on a flight. Now he had to warm up the transmission - the gearbox, the transfer case, the drive axles, paying special attention to this issue.
Gear oils at that time were such that until the unit warms up to plus 10 ° C, its gears and bearings will not receive proper lubrication. The result is overheating and jamming of the bearings. In addition, the thickened oil in the transmission provides such a significant resistance to movement that it had to be taken into account even in the case of such powerful and high-torque vehicles as the ZIL-151 and Ural-375. For example, at the moment of starting off a frozen truck, the resistance to movement in the transmission is 4 times higher than normal. Even after 2-3 km of run, this figure is reduced only by half. So starting off and driving for the first 10–15 km in frost of minus 30 ° C had to be made as smooth and unhurried as possible.
Otherwise - the prospect of repairing a bridge or a box right on the snow, and even with a fresh wind (as is usually the case).
It would seem that everyone warmed up successfully - you can go on the route and drive calmly to the goal. But no, it didn’t work out calmly - the northern coefficients and allowances for the tariff scale in Soviet times were not paid in vain. The fact is that at low temperatures (about minus 30-40 ° C), even under load, car units did not warm up to the optimum temperature then.
In the photo: ZIL-157This was a problematic moment, especially for diesel vehicles, which are very sensitive to the temperature of the fuel and air entering the intake manifold. In addition, for any type of engine, it was important to keep warm during parking - do not warm up the engine again after every stop for lunch!
Therefore, drivers were forced to equip their cars with effective thermal insulation - "insulation means" in the terminology of those years.
The task is to ensure a steady temperature in the engine compartment at a level of plus 20–30 ° C with an outboard frost of minus 30 ° C and below.
First of all, these are thick leatherette-cotton and leatherette-felt covers covering the hood from all sides, lifting radiator shutters, a blind pan of the power unit, which also covers the gearbox. Since water was used in the cooling system, there was always a danger of it freezing at some points in the system. They simply fought this - by wrapping, for example, the lower radiator pipe with a wool tape, followed by protecting it with a layer of paint. It turns out similar to the current inlet exhaust manifold insulation, which other modern tuners are so proud of.
At the same time, insulation measures were not always developed in a handicraft way, science worked on the issue - the departmental institute NIIAT, designers of car factories - Yaroslavl and Kremenchug. It was professional designers who developed systems for heating fuel tanks with exhaust gases and diesel fuel from the “return”, covers and casings for fuel filters, as well as methods for insulating tanks with asbestos mats or two-layer coating.
Having kept the units in working order, it was necessary not to freeze yourself. But the first domestic truck with a full-fledged cabin heater was the Ural-375 sample 1961 years old: with outboards of minus 33 ° C, it provided plus 15-20 ° C at the level of the driver's head. Before that, the “stoves” were also weak, and not everything was in order with the tightness of the cabins. And special northern versions of machines appeared in the USSR even later.
In the photo: pre-production Ural-375 '1961–63 Therefore, it was already necessary to insulate the cabs with old blankets and quilted batting in the conditions of motor depots. The seals of the windows and doors were additionally glued with rubber, and they fought against freezing of the windshield by rubbing it with a lump of rags with a pinch of salt inside. Representatives of "science" offered drivers of dump trucks overhead electric heaters and overhead second glass. Both that, and another did not differ in high practicality therefore did not receive wide circulation.
But potbelly stoves have taken root in car cabs! Handicraft and "professional" developments were particularly compact, the shape of the body was adjusted to the amount of legroom for the right passenger, where the stove was usually mounted. The most advanced options - such as the charcoal stove designed by G. G. Mansfeld - were equipped with a water circuit, so that they could heat water in the engine cooling system, thus acting as a preheater.
At minus 50 °C outside the window, it maintained quite comfortable plus 15 °C in the standard “salon” of the MAZ-200, and the temperature of the engine turned off more than a day ago averaged plus 50 °C. Although it is unexpected - to heat coal or wood in a car, the solution is undoubtedly useful. Despite the fact that we are talking about the twentieth century ...
In the photo: MAZ-200history practice
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