Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Where has the spare wheel gone?

When have you last time seen somebody change a wheel? When did you use a spare wheel last time yourself? Do you actually have one in your car at all? As you may know many of the modern cars come without a spare wheel, but they may be equipped with a tire fit system. You pump some stuff into the wheel and re-inflate it. Often though the process doesn't work. Because either the stuff in the bottle is too old or there's just not enough of it to really fix the tire. For me these things never worked. In the old days spare wheels were much more important than today. Much more often you suffered from a puncture. And sometimes even one spare wheel wasn't enough, that's why pre-war cars often even had two spare wheels. Even in rallies, for example the East African Safari, the pilots loaded two wheels onto the roof or into the trunk if there was enough space. Also the tools were different in the past. There was a central fixture for the wheel, you needed a hammer and a pretty large tool to remove it. But I am sure there's not a lot of nostalgia in changing wheels. I am actually glad that we rarely have to do this today, not everything was better in the past ...

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