You’re an adventure rider, a traveller, an overlander …
there’ll come a time, when out on the road, you’ll need to
pull a tyre from the rim; a puncture or just replacing the
worn rubber. It will happen. It’s that time when swearing
and cursing becomes the norm. It’s inevitable. But it
needn’t be a task that induces anger, tension, stress.
Recently receiving a
Tyre-Pro tool kit from
Eastbound we thought
what better way to start
work on changing a tyre
and replacing a tube;
two different bikes, two
very different wheels
and tyres.
The
first
thing
you notice with the
Eastbound Tyre-Pro kit
is just how light it is, the
kit comes in two small
pouches and together
weigh little more than
500 grams, a huge
difference to the tools
we usually carry ( 1.1
kilograms). Does this
mean the quality and
strength aren’t there?
Absolutely not! The
Eastbound Tyre-Pro kit
is made from aircraft grade 7075 T6 Aluminium. That’s
the good stuff; the least workable and strongest of all
aluminium alloys, in fact as strong as most steel alloys.
The lack of workability means it is extremely resistant to
damage. All parts are CNC milled in the Netherlands. You
can’t fault the quality or engineering.
The Eastbound Tyre-Pro kit comes with all the
equipment needed to remove the wheel and tyre, and of
course get it all back together.
First task; to replace the front tyre on a Yamaha XV1600.
A stiff, heavy duty cruiser tyre on a 17” rim. This could be
interesting. The kit we were supplied came with a 17mm
and 24mm pair of full-sized ring spanners. Yes, not suited
to the 22mm needed on
the Yamaha – for this
part of the review it
mattered little, this was
a job performed in the
TRAVERSE workshop.
We were told to
read the instructions
carefully and ask any
questions as soon as
we struck difficulty.
This
didn’t
bode
well, we were given
the impression the
Eastbound
Tyre-pro
tools would be difficult
to use. Nonsense, the
Eastbound
Tyre-Pro
kit is self-explanatory,
a quick review of the
instructions and we
were away.
Insert one of the
‘spoons’,
create
a
gap, insert the second ‘spoon’ … easy. Using the patent
pending bead breaker inserted between the two ‘spoons’
you have a fulcrum that easily levers the bead away from
the rim, it opens to 35mm, it would be hard to imagine any
bead not being broken away from the rim by this. With
the included lever sections connected there is a length of
270mm on each of the ‘spoons’, the levering force is such
TRAVERSE 122