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Assessment of the Problems of Manual Automobile Tyre Bead Breaking Equipment in Nigeria


DA Adetan
GE Agwogie
KA Oladejo

Abstract

The tyre-rim bead bond must be broken to carry out repairs on a failed automobile tyre. The use of the locally fabricated manual bead breaking equipment as it is being practiced today by commercial tyre repair artisans in Nigeria is characterized by drudgery. This article reports a study of the local manual bead breaking technology with a view to identifying where engineering design effort could be directed to remove the drudgery involved. The results show that majority (62.5%) of the tyre repair artisans never went beyond elementary primary school education level. Majority (40.82%) of them are of the opinion that the redesign effort should be focused on the bead breaking edge to remove the characteristic drudgery. Furthermore, the bead breaking difficulty and time generally increased with increase in rim size. Specific recommendations were made for the redesign of the local tool to eliminate the drudgery of the bead breaking process.


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eISSN: 2467-8821
print ISSN: 0331-8443