Another Tire-Related Development

Maintenance/Repairs
41

The source of the photo is a screen capture from a video published by Scientia Plus and available on YouTube. The toilet was imaged at 2:45…

https://youtu.be/X0jKOY-3x2g

But the trouble being “No Toilet Paper…” and the astronauts tearing up the user manual to use the paper was a joke…

But having no toilet on a 10-day flight is no joke and if you watched this other video, also on YouTube, then you realize that this “new generation” of engineers are not concerned about learning from the past and are intent on making their own mistakes… I do wonder if the toilet had not been fixed, would the astronauts have had enough diapers to hold them over for the entire trip… And that ain’t no :poop: … :joy:

https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU

Now, that statement about the New Generation of NASA engineers is not spoken without some firsthand knowledge… I practically live in the shadow of NASA/Langley and most of my neighbors are NASA employees. This photo is a Drone photo from my back yard, showing the Gantry the Neil Armstrong used to practice the Moon Landing with the Lunar Lander Simulator…

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Landing_Research_Facility

I have to edit this posting to add this new find…

At 3:00, in this new video, you can see the User manual that they might use if they do not have any paper to clean up afterwards, and yes, they do need paper… As you know, no job is complete until the “paper-work” is complete… :rofl:

BTW, you can see the toilet paper at 4:30… and then clean you would clean yourself at 6:06…

https://plus.nasa.gov/video/how-to-use-the-bathroom-in-space-2/

Ladies and Gentlemen, please ensure your tray tables are in their full upright position.

Thank you for flying with Artemis…

42

And then you checked the torque on the Lug Nuts, Right?

43

Oh, I am concerned and I have to ask what type of Tire Manufacturer your company was when you have leaky tires installed on wheels… A research project, huh? Was the tire one of your newly manufactured ones, did they acquire the wheel from a junk yard… Did your company buy valve stems off ebay?

The testing and research project just sound so iffy…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vncAPaTZhT8?feature=share

44

Why not?

Mechanics. or technicians, in many tire or garage places, have to meet production goals, and some times steps get missed. I don’t always blame them.

45

That sentiment is very generous of you considering if a tire comes off, you could lose control of your car with all the known possibilities for the passengers of a car crashing, and the loose tire careening down the road (you’ve seen the various videos?).

I do not think they would be so generous if the “missed step” was the employer forgetting to give them their pay check…

46

I don’t blame the techs for the time limits imposed on them by their employer to complete a ticket. Some times during even a simple ticket: A new round of four tires, remove old ones, mount and balance new tires, put them back on the car, discovery happens: A tech notices a bad brake component (broken caliper, worn drum, grooved disc) and has to stop the job to tell the counter staff so they can inform the customer.

If they hurry to complete a round of four in the proscribed 1.5 hours, yeah, something like a single lugnut or a valve cap could get missed.

Mistakes - however outrageous or impossible as one may seem - happen, especially when time limits are imposed on an employee’s work, or alternately, finishing the job ahead of time is significantly incentivized.

47

Generally a tech doing the work does the inspection 1st and then turns in the paperwork and then starts the mount and balance process…
Most techs can easily mount and balance OEM size automotive tires in 20 minutes, I have worked with guys that could mount and balance a set of 4 24" 30-35 series or you name it tires in a matter of 10 minutes or less, and that is on a more basic table top Coats/Hunter machine (see pic below), when you have the feel for it, it is easy…

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1.5 hours?, mechanics would LOVE to have 1.5 hours to mount and balance 4 tires… lol but I know what you meant…

Our guys got paid 0.6 (0.1 =6 minutes) to mount and balance 4 tires and an added 0.5 for 4 low profile tires…

48

That’s what I was told by a major tire chain while I was shootin the breeze with an associate out on a cig break.

49

Last I heard Discount Tire makes their guys do it in like 10 minutes, buy they also have 1 person per tire being changed, and they don’t do anything but tire service, so NO inspections… And they also do 100 tires a day… pure volume is how they make their money…

50

Really Dave? One minute 30 seconds to remove lugnuts, remove tire/wheel from vehicle, remove old tire, mount new tire, balance tire, reinstall on vehicle, tighten lugnuts! Then repeat three more times. It would take me a couple of minutes to drive the car in, match up the lift points, then raise the car.

How much time did you give them for an oil change?

2 Likes
51

Mistakes happen, period. I don’t care who you are or what you do for a living, at some point you will make a mistake. I lost a wheel off a car, and to top it off I was the Shop Foreman at the time. It was one of those days, I think I had 2 guys call out sick, and I was trying to keep the flow going by picking up a couple of jobs. I got called to the phone or had to help someone, and I left the left rear wheel lugs loose. I went for post-service test drive, got 100 feet out the driveway and thought “what’s that noise” and in the mirror saw lugs nuts flying off. Had to walk back to the shop, grab a floor jack…

I’m in contact with dealership techs regularly and the going rate for mount/balance 4 is 1.0 to 1.5. My last job in the aftermarket, 1.2 for standard and 2.0 for low-pro, oversized, or anything over 1/2 ton.

2 Likes
52

Hours? Make more sense. Even the Discount tire example, a tech was given ten minutes per tire, much more than Dave’s 1.5 minutes per tire.

53

I don’t usually watch the guys unless I’m walking around but if I remember it is anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes to change and balance four tires. I fugure I’ll be there an hour but usually less.

54

Maybe @davesmopar was especially well-caffeinated when he was doing tires at his stated lightning speed :cup_with_straw:

2 Likes
55

Labor is billed/paid in tenth of an hour increments.

0.1 hours = 6 minutes

0.6 hours = 36 minutes.

A 1.5-hour completion time to install four tires is a reasonable promise to the customer provided a lift will be available soon. If the customers vehicle is in the parking lot and the repair order is being place in the dispatch cue, the vehicle won’t be ready in 36 minutes.

1 Like
56

The time frame I am talking about was just for mounting and balancing tires, after the vehicle was in the bay, yes I have seen guys do it many times, not many guys are that fast but once everything is staged it can be done pretty fast… At one time, we had a bay just for oil changes and a bay just for tire replacement, the oil change was expected to be done in 30 minutes or less from the time the vehicle is pulled in, tires done in 60 minutes or less once the vehicle was pulled in the bay NO up sales could be done in those 2 dedicated bays, it was stupid… But that soon faded away, but the pay stayed the same all the time, now if the vehicle had a courtesy check that paid 0.1, a vehicle inspection even more time, if anything was upsold, time was added and the customer was updated with the new time frame…
Do things go wrong and mess all that up, sure, but one thing we rarely have to deal with is rust, unlike you guys up north, our vehicles are mostly rust free, so things can be done much smoother and faster down here… Of course as more and more vehicles are made with low pro tires, it takes longer to service them…
The guys that are doing the tires that fast are normally turning 70 to 100+ hours a week, yes they are that fast… The fastest guy I ever worked with would turn 25 hours on Friday and 30 hours on Saturday every week, he worked 7am till 5pm Friday and 7am till 6pm on Saturday, the other 3 days he was just their to catch us up when/if we got behind, he was our #2 diagnostic guy, so he did timing belts and whatever was needed basically, our #1 daig guy (retired now) at that shop (East Nashville shop) only worked 7-5 m-f and minimum turned 75 hours a week, and that is on a slow week… Heck I had a NADC kid that work from like 2pm till 6pm 3 days a week and then 7am-6pm on weekends and turned 60 hours a week, when he finished school I hired him on full time and he jumped to turning minimum 80 hours a week… Funny, he said I taught him more than the school did… lol

I worked with another guy at another shop that only did brakes suspensions, alignments and tires, oil change if on the ticket, but very little under hood, but dang anything under vehicle he was stupid fast at with almost no comebacks, he turned 80+ hours a week every week, we called him Big John, dude was huge…

Don’t get me wrong, lots of guys struggled to turn 40-50 hours a week because they didn’t understand how to flow vehicles and like to talk and were just plane slow… I was flowing $87,000 a month just in service out of a 6 bay shop plus alignment bay with a good staff including front and back shop around 2010… I was flowing over $100,000 a month just in service out of a 7 bay shop plus alignment bay in 2008, the highest car flowing shop I ever worked at, we ran 75+ vehicles a day I don’t remember how much in service a month, but we had 3 people selling $75,000 a month plus 3 more selling $40,000+ a month, that was service and tires, not just service… That was a very high stress shop running some massive numbers…

At the Broadway (Nashville) shop in 2013 our normal week was 200 tires, $30,000 in service and $50,000 in total sales a month out of 8 bays plus alignment bay… 4-5 front shop and 7-8 back shop employees… I worked there from 2011 till it closed…

This was from a normal Friday sales sheet back on May 13 2016, the top set of numbers was for the day, the lower set of numbers was for the week, we still had Saturday to go, these were our sales numbers for tires, then service then total sales… Top guy was the store manger, the 2nd guy was me, the 3rd guy was just sales probably helping out from another store or still in training, the 5th guy (well 4th but 5th counting the blank guy) was the tire manager… You can take the total sales minus the service sales, divided by the number of tires to see what the average tire was sold for, example, my 68 tires for the week averaged $111 per tire… Labor rate was also in the $130 to $140 per hour range back then… We averaged 30-50 vehicles a day at that time

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Same store but on May 23 2017, it was our numbers for that Thursday, we ran 39 vehicles that day… Top set of numbers was for the day, 2nd set for the week so far, and the 3rd set was the month so far and the 4th set was for the year to date… Top guy was the store manager, don’t remember the 2nd guy and the 3rd was me for the day, week and month, for the year I was the 5th guy down, tire manager was out and we had some fill in’s and for the year it was messed up with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th guys…

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The Broadway store was closed at the beginning of 2019, sold the land and now it is a skyscraper for a bank or something…
The 75 vehicles a day shop was almost doing a week what the Broadway store did a month, but the 75 vehicles a day was in 2019 cause they were now doing both theirs plus most of the Broadways customers also…

As I have often said, dealers play by their own rules and do not effect our time on certain jobs, we had a lot of standard flat rate times that dealers went buy the labor guides per the vehicle..

2 Likes
57

And for haha’s here is for Thursday Dec 21 2017 the last the week of the year I before I went on vacation, I was burnt out and didn’t care, the top one was the store manager and he was doing his best to beat my numbers, I was number 2 for the day, week and month, and the 3rd down for the year, the rest where other front shop sales… That day we ran 53 vehicles through the shop…
Shop supplies are never included in the sales numbers…

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1 Like
58

How many bays does that establishment have?

59

Which one?? I talked about a few different ones, but the Broadway shop had 7 bays with an alignment bay, we had 2 bays in the back not used much, mainly used for unloading the tire and parts truck, we stocked about 2,000 tires and a few million in parts… We were also a hub store so we transferred a bunch of tires daily… We often had to transfer tires back in that we sold that we had just transferred out to a different store… We could pull from other stores or a few big local warehouses…

Here is a few screen shots from google maps late 2018 a few months before it closed forever…

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Screenshot 2026-04-04 073809
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No idea what day of the week or time of day (if guessing around mid afternoon) it is there, but it looks slow, not many people walking around.. From 7am till about 9am, could not test drive due to heavy traffic, from about 4pm till 6:30pm same thing, traffic looks lite there… lol… The big intersection shown right beside us is the on/off ramp (12th ave st) for I65… Our parking was a little on the side and in back of the building…

Fun fact, that McDonald’s next door to us is often regarded as the busiest McDonald’s in the South… I think the one in Atlanta is one of the busiest in the country…

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1 Like
60

I guess having 5 or more available/active bays could allow for a longer expected standard time allotment for most jobs - assuming 90 percent or more tire related. 1.0 - to the 1.5 hours I was told.

And again, that’s a maximum allotment. It might take a seasoned tech just 40-50 minutes to remove olds, mount and balance news, and put them on the vehicle. A newbie, 1 hour to 80min.

Also I read that for full replacement tire jobs, some places assign four techs to a car, so one tech always does driver side front, another, drivers side rear, another, passenger side front, and so on? I gues the benefit of that is everything goes back where it came off.