FITTING TYRES ON MY CARPORT

Yes my DIY attempts are sounding more crazy by the year. Indeed 
this is so far officially a project of last year now, since I did 
much of the work on the weekend and was so tired out from it by new 
year's day that I scrapped plans to finish things off then. My 
attitude wasn't helped the night before by the new annual music 
festival catapulting thumping bass notes across the planes until 
3AM while I was attempting not to stay up to midnight.

But I did get tyres on half of the car port, ten in total, and 
eventually even a way to get the car out again afterwards. The 
distinction is that these tyres are no longer round, instead just 
the tread section cut out into a long strip, then hung from the 
side of the carport like a giant version of one of those rubber fly 
strip things that people hang above doorways. My version isn't to 
block flys, but the sun. Seeing as my raised mouse-proof garage for 
the Jag isn't finished I decided I'd at least try to find some way 
to stop the summer sun from further damaging the still 
distantly-attractive paintwork when it shines in the ends during 
the morning and afternoon.

Obvious things like enclosing the carport are met with structural 
challenges, especially while contemplating the often quite extreme 
winds that blow through it, already often lifting the carport roof 
up and crashing it down again with a familiar but otherwise 
alarming crash. The tyres, I hope, will simply blow about and 
absorb the energy by flapping about, without putting all the force 
on the side of the structure like a sail. So far it seems to be 
working OK, they're so heavy that it actually takes a fair bit of 
wind to move them much at all, and they're not long enough to hit 
the car if they do.

For the interest of any other tempted tyre tacklers, old tyres can 
be sourced for free from tyre places or mechanics, who otherwise 
usually have to pay for their removal (in Australia, at least). 
Widths vary and the wider the better, especially as wide tyres tend 
to be easier to flat once cut apart.

The side walls of the tyres can be cut off with a jigsaw and a 
coarse timber-cutting blade. This won't get you anywhere for 
cutting across the tread section itself though, because the steel 
wires that run around the tyre catch the blade (regardless of the 
type of blade used). An angle grinder works alright, except that 
the wires and rubber eat through cutting discs surprisingly 
quickly, maybe only three tyres per disc, and the stink of burning 
rubber is unbearable! It's cheaper and healthier to use a bench 
drill (a hand-held electric drill would be too difficult) with a 
large drill bit to drill a row of holes across the tread, then 
clamp it in a vise and cut through with a coarse-bladed hacksaw. 
This will also get hung up a bit on the wires, but unlike with the 
jigsaw, with the hacksaw you can  heave your way through and it 
actually works pretty well. One of those reciprocating saw things 
might work too, but although I've got an old one of those, I never 
did get around to buying a blade to go in it.

You now have a bendy strip of rubber, with sratchy sharp wires 
jotting out of the ends. These may deserve some respect, although I 
like doing these jobs naked so I didn't give them much, and mostly 
got away with it. To get the bend out, stretch one out on flat-ish 
ground and put weights on the end and middle. I made piles like 
this about three tyres thick and found they set fairly (but not 
entirely) flat after a few days. It seems best to flip them over 
every other day, and it probably helps if it's warm and sunny. 
Laying them side by side after this, it seems like they'd make a 
rough floor for a shed as well, perhaps even a roof over something 
like a leaky caravan if overlayed them or found a way to join the 
gaps between them.

For mounting to the carport, I cut a length of angle-iron and 
bolted through each tyre tread to the beam of the carport roof to 
sandwidch them between those two steel surfaces. Steel cable was 
threaded through the ends of two halves of the 'tyre curtain', then 
run up to the top and clamped in with the outer-most tyre treads. 
The other end of the cable was pulled apart and the strands clamped 
in another 12mm bolt with some wishers, to stop it pulling through 
the holes. Then I eventually, after various failed schemes 
involving pulleys, figured out that I just needed some long bolts 
jotting out of carport supports either side of the curtain and I 
could hook the cable with its attached tyre treads on them at each 
side, spreading the treads apart so there's enough of a gap to 
drive the car in/out between them.

Now I just need to do the same at the other end, where I've already 
prepared the tyres, and don't need to lift them aside for the car 
to drive through. It was a lot more work than expected, but so are 
most such things. It seems to be working to keep most of the sun 
off, and presumably rain as well.

 - The Free Thinker