Accident with Aluminum Wheel

 We were coming home from an auction the other day where we'd bought an old camper on a pickup trailer. We were coming down the gravel roads and traveling slow when a rim blew on the right front of the pickup. I was driving as Robert just had surgery on his shoulder. Long story but he got hurt at work two years ago, since then, he's had his back fused, his neck fused, his left shoulder replaced and his now his right shoulder rotator cuff repaired. He had such a tear in that cuff! The doctor said the top of his arm was pushing up through the tear, wearing a hole in the edge of the cup at the top of the shoulder. They were able to push the arm back into a correct position, then they placed four anchors into the rotator cuff and created what they called a suture bridge over the hole, trying to pull it together. The insurance has waited two years to do this surgery so the muscles and tendons were retracting and the doc was barely able to pull the tear together. He had to graft tissue into the hole and hopes it will all grow together to create a once again useable arm for Robert. So here we are, tooling down the road with this old camper behind us when the rim blows. Robert was in Viet Nam. When the rim blew, he would have hit the deck if he was able to...it sounded like a shot gun went off in the cab. We managed to change the tire and get on our way again. I'm posting this because we had just had new tires put on the truck. At the tire shop, they used a tire machine to change the tires for us. After we brought the truck home with the new tires on, the same right front that blew, went flat. We took it back to the tire shop, and they checked it over. Told us we needed to put a tube in that tire and it would be ok. The moral to the story is, it wasn't ok. I suppose we would have been nearly killed if we'd been going down the highway 55 miles an hour. Don't let a tire shop use an old style tire machine on your aluminum wheels. It cracks the wheels and causes them to blow apart under pressure. Now that we're still alive, we'll be having a lot of fun in that old camper we bought, but we will be changing out the wheels to steel ones. See you on Benchmark this summer! Donna