Recycling

I race a lot of offroad classes all over the Southeast so that means I have a lot of wheels. Not as many as some but definitely more than your average racer does.

(1 of 2 for my E-Buggy, JConcepts bags help keep things organized.)

What I do to reduce the costs of replacing worn out tires is recycling rims. For this to work more efficiently for me I do have several sets of extra rims. This way I’m never fully dependent on getting tires off before I start gluing new ones. Every couple of weeks or so I go through all of my tires to weed out the ones that aren’t worth putting on the track anymore.

Now there are a few ways to remove a tire from a rim, boiling, baking, or Acetone. I use Acetone. It takes the longest, 1-2 days, but you are less likely to damage the rim and it doesn’t require supervision.

I just use a shoe box sized plastic container from Walmart. You could use bigger or smaller even but this lets me do about one and a half sets at a time.

Now a couple tips for you:

-Use rocks or beads for a fish tank to take up some of the space and save yourself a little Acetone. I only fill to the top of the rocks. The wheels don’t need to be submerged, fumes are enough to break-down the glue.

-You’ll save a lot of space by cutting the tires off and removing the foams. I always leave enough tire to pull on.

-Pull on the tires once to twice a day to speed up the process. Sometimes the tire will come right off sometimes it won’t.

-You can use the Acetone to clean any remaining glue off the rim.