How to fill tires with liquid ballast

With helpful detail, we show how to fill tractor tires with Rim Guard Beet Juice Tire Ballast, demonstrating each step, from jacking up the tractor to prevent rolling, to filling the tire, to finally topping off the tires’ air to operating pressure.

Hi, I'm Bob Koch from Rim Guard and today we're gonna go through all the steps to fill a tire with liquid tire ballast.

First thing we did with our tractor here is we got it jacked up in the back with chocks in the front to make sure we were safe, no rolling of the tractor. Once the tractor was up, once the rear wheels were up, we were able to rotate the valve stem on the side we're gonna be working on down to six o'clock. Then we lowered the tire back down so it was touching the ground and we removed the pressure in the tire, deflated it down to about five psi. We didn't go any further than that because we don't want to have any concern about the tire actually breaking the bead. These are 16 9 24s, the fill is going to be 61 gallons for each of them. And we'll get started here in just a second.

Okay, now we've got the tire deflated down to five psi and we've actually lowered the tire back up off the ground so we can rotate it. And so we're gonna follow the filling as we go up. The first step we have to do is we have to remove the core from the valve stem, and we're going to do that with the core ejector tool that comes with all the pumps. We're going to be able to attach this right on to here like this. We're gonna grab on to the core, unthread it and pull it out.

The next step is going to be actually filling the tire. We've got our pump set with the regulator set down to about 40 psi. Anything more than that is not necessary with this pump and with our liquid. It just causes excess foaming.

Okay, so we've got the core pulled out the valve stem at this point in time, we're ready to actually start filling the tire. We're going to fill it from the bottom and as it fills up to the level here, we're going to start to rotate the tire up and follow it up. The only thing we'll have to do as we fill the tire is to monitor the buildup of pressure from the fluid going in the tire. And at some point we'll have to stop it and relieve that pressure in there. So I'm going to start the pump up now and start pumping in.

Okay, we got liquid going in there. I'll sign off now and we'll come back when we need to relieve the pressure.

Okay, we're about half full at this point in time and I can tell the pump was starting to slow down. So we're going to rotate this all the way up to the top, get it outside of the liquid level, and we're going to have the pump off, and reverse the pump and let some of that pressure out. Once it starts to slow down, then we'll just close it off and rotate back down so we're in the liquid phase again. Right about there. Start the pump back up. And then I'll show you when we get to the end, and we're up at the top, how to reverse that and how to finish off the job at that point.

Okay, we've got the tire filled all the way up at the top. We know that because we can tell the difference in the sound of pumping when we got up there. And we can tell just by knocking that we’re right to where we want to be. And we've backed off a little bit of liquid that came above that by just reversing the pump on here at this point in time. So we're ready to put the core back in. Okay, we can loosen this up here. And as we do this we're going to turn the pump on so we extract the fluid out of the lines here. There we go. Clear the line out.

And we’re all set, just put the valve cap back on there. And now we're going to lower the tire back down and we're all set. Tire is filled.

One final step is we want to top off the air in here back to the operating pressure and for this tire it's about 22 pounds per square inch. Check the gauge here, we just are about there. Just need a little bit more air in there. So he's gonna spit on you a little bit at this point. Check it one more time. Perfect. Little clean up, and that's it. Put on the next tire and fill the other side and we're all done.

Alright, so we've got the other side filled, we're all set to just lower the jack and get it out of here. But I thought before we finish this, we’d go through a summary of all the steps that we took to fill the tires.

If you remember, the first thing we did is we jacked up the tractor, got the rear wheels off the ground, rotated the side we're going to work on with the valve stem down to six o'clock. We removed the pressure in the tire down to about five psi, leaving some pressure in there so we didn't have a problem of potentially breaking the bead, which isn't isn't likely, but it can happen.

We attached the core ejector tool to the valve stem. We pulled the core out. We hooked up our pump and we started filling the tire from the bottom. Once the level got above the valve stem at six o'clock, we started to rotate the tire around. We got about half full. We were backed up with a lot of pressure inside - you can tell because the pump was slowing down. We stopped the pump, turned off the air, turned the pump to the evacuation side and let some of the pressure go out and shove some of the air back out of there into the tank. Once that was complete, we started our process of filling again until we got up to the top. Made sure we were filled right to the top. We put the core back into the valve stem and relieved a little bit of pressure by reversing the pump as we were releasing the core ejector tool from the valve here, so we didn't have any leaks and we were able to clear out the lines. Process takes, takes about 20-25 minutes for a tire this size for 61 gallon fill. Worked out pretty well.

If you have any questions about how to do this, give us a call at Rim Guard (866) 792-3700. Thank you for watching.

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