Rabaconda street tire changer: initial review

[pdedse]

Ok fine. I'm sold. Next time any of my bikes are up from r tires I'm ordering one of these.

I think it's important that one really wants to do this. If a local shop charged $25-35 per tire mounted and balanced with me taking them off, I'd go that route, but $75 off the bike / $100 on...that was too much.

I'll add one detail thing if anyone ends up buying this. Of concern to me was that while it seemed to work ok from the videos, would I end up scratching the rims? I'm happy to report that not at all, once I realized how to use the supplied tire iron.

Rabaconda has some videos, and you can find plenty more on youtube. But there's one little detail that wasn't obvious, and it has to do with the very first step at removing the tire where you have to use the tire iron to pry the bead over what's called "the duck head" apparatus (the hard plastic black part--it actually looks like a duck's head / bill). In Rabaconda's original video, when the guy inserts the tire iron, you can't see what he's doing because of the angle. I thought he was using a separate rim protector and the tire iron over it. I did this but my rim protector separated open and I scratched the lip of the rim a bit. It sanded out just fine, but rewatching videos, re-reading instructions I realized that the tire iron is placed on top of the duck head apparatus itself--you don't need a rim protector, that's part of the job the duck head.

Rabaconda got some feedback on this because between my first tire change and the second, they updated their tire removal video and they make this detail much more obvious.

Here are some stills from the video:









And here's the updated video, this one for a tubeless tire.





I think the above steps were the only confusing part. It helped to watch a few non-produced Rabaconda videos, read and re-read the fairly clear instructions. I've read others saying that after several attempts they can break the bead, remove the tire and install a new one just as quickly as they can set up the tire changer. While I think that's an exaggeration, I can see that from set-up to braking the bead, tire removal, balancing, and mounting new tire will be done faster than I can remove / install the wheel/tire from the bike. But...by the time I get to the front tires I'll probably have forgotten everything and have to start over.



But I've enjoyed learning how to do this, and just in time as it looks like beginning Tuesday we will miraculously have a dry week into next weeend.