I’ve been telling people for years that changing tires is all about technique, not equipment, and you can change tires easily with just two small aluminum tire irons, and good tire lube. A bead holder is handy but not critical. I’m not wrong for smaller bikes, like dual sport and small-ish adventure bikes, or for vintage bikes with narrower rims than are common these days. But yesterday I changed the rear tire on my Ducati Desert-X, and it was a struggle. The stock rear tire is a Pirelli Scorpion Rally STR 150/70/18. My technique for “breaking” the bead is to slather on tire lube diluted with water and work around the rim with a tire iron, pushing the bead down a bit and letting the tire lube penetrate. After two or three revolutions around the tire the bead can be levered down into the dropcenter easily. But the Ducati has cross spoke, tubeless rims, and there’s no edge on the rim to lever against. So I needed to use my old tire mounting stand which has a simple bead breaker built in. I had to struggle with the bead for about 15 minutes to get it to push into the drop center. The other side went quicker, but was still a struggle. Getting the wheel out of the old tire is usually very easy if you have good tire lube–I generally just pull the wheel out by hand. But the sidewalls were so stiff that I had to use tire irons to get the rim out. About 30 minutes of struggling.
Mounting the new tire–a Dunlop Trailmax Mission–was quite a battle, the tire has even stiffer sidewalls than the stock Pirelli and the edges of the bead have a soft lip extension that might just be extraneous flash from the molding process, but might be intentional. It grabbed the rim and made it more difficult to lever the tire on. I was tempted to trim it off, but after I looked at it carefully it seemed too regular to be just mold flash. So I left it and just lubed it a bit more. I had to use long steel tire irons to make any progress. I lubed the beads with undiluted tire lube which made the tire and wheel quite slippery. It took me 20 minutes to get one side into the drop center, and then another 30 minutes to finish mounting the tire. The bead stop was a lifesaver, even though it won’t hook onto the spokes because the cross-spoke means the spokes are at a shallower angle, it still keeps the bead from slipping back off the rim, and kept the edge pointed towards the drop center. All in, it was more than an hour of struggling at something that usually takes 15 minutes and I had to use irons that I don’t usually carry. It’s a tubeless tire, I wouldn’t expect to have to dismount it on a ride to fix a flat, but I’m going to have to revisit my toolkit to prepare for the unlikely eventuality that I might have to do something grim by the side of the road. I doubt I could make progress with my dinky aluminum irons that I find so useful for narrower wheels and tires.
So yes, to anyone I might have mislead or offended with my blithe comment that it’s all just technique–sorry about that. I’ve changed hundreds of motorcycle tires over my riding life, both as a pro mechanic and as a committed amateur with a LOT of bikes and friends that need help with their bikes. I’ve never struggled this much (that I remember). One shop I worked at had a tire machine–I used it several times but it damaged a nice Akront rim so I never used it again. But if I did big wheels and wide tires very often, I might be tempted to try a tire machine or at least built a better stand to do the work.