How to Remove Front Wheel of Electric Trike | Change Flat on Tricycle Front Wheel

Hey guys, Peter here at sixthreezero. I'm going to teach you today how to change out the flat on your tricycle.

All right, hey guys, it's Peter here, sixthreezero. I run customer service, quality control, and also operations. So if anything along the line goes wrong for you, you know who to call. Just give us a call and we will get an answer for you. Today I'm going to show you that you can change out the front wheel, which has the motor. You can change out your flat if you get a flat on the front motor wheel. And I want to tell you that you can do it because obviously tricycles and e-tricycles are bulky and they're heavy, and so it's going to be hard to get to a bike shop. Nowadays, there are mobile mechanics. But listen, I know that you got an e-tricycle to get back out in the world and start getting moving and take control of your life again. And this is another way to do it. Let's dive in. I want you to do it yourself. All right, let's go.

I want to show you the thing seems a little heavy too. So trying to get this off to a bike shop, yeah, it could be done, but you might want a buddy who has a pickup truck or something. So anyway, let's see if we can do it ourselves. It takes very few tools. You will need an air pump of some kind. One thing I do want to tell you is don't go to a gas station and fill up the tire with the hose there. It'll pop it. Those are made for cars. All right, so to show you that it can be done very simply, I'm even going to use the toolkit that comes with your tricycle or with your e-trike. So I'm going to pull out, I'm going to use an 18 millimeter.

See if I can find that puppy. Oh, I took it out already. Here it is. I'm going to need something to snip some zip ties with right here. All right, cool. Let's go for it. So the first step is we're going to loosen the brakes. So it's very simple. You just go ahead and grab this little silver noodle here. It's called a noodle. You squeeze the brakes together and then you can pull the noodle out. I'll position myself here, maybe we'll get a close-up, maybe we won't. And then the brakes will come apart like that. That's just an easy operation. Doesn't use any tools at all. That's also how you get the wheel in and then you can reattach the brakes. So now what we want to do is that you can remove the wheel to fix the tire, there is a connection here.

If this was a solid piece of wire right here, you wouldn't be able to remove the wheel. So we're going to disconnect this. When we do this, we want to be careful, because there are tiny, tiny little pins in here. If one of those pins gets hurt just a little bit, you're going to get this funny check engine light. Check the engine light, just like you get in your car, and it's going to be annoying. We'll probably have to send you a new wheel or something. It could even be very costly. So we'll be gentle with that. Now so what we need to do to get to that, we're going to need to snip these zip ties. We just need to snip the one on the lower part. Put those over here in my helmet. And then I'm carefully going to pull the connection apart. There you go. Now they're separated.

Now the bike or the front wheel is disconnected from the rest of the e-tricycle. When you put this back together, you've already done this if you've assembled it yourself, but if you had a friend or someone else do it, then you may not know this. There's an arrow right here, and then there's an arrow on the other side too. You need to line these up, line arrows up very carefully and very gently. You want to push it in gently. And when you start to feel some resistance, then you can go ahead and push it firmly because right above the arrow on the wheel side, there's a tiny little line. You want that line to go all the way up to the other side when you reconnect it so that it has a good firm positive connection.

If it's not in, you'll still get that check engine light. And we've had a lot of folks sometimes that aren't able to push it in because it does take a pretty firm force there. So just make sure that that little tiny line gets all the way nice and tucked up into the other connector here. That way you know that you're going to have a good positive connection and you won't have the check engine light. Okay okay, so now that we've got the electrical connection disconnected, we're going to remove a rubber cap on this side. It's just a cap that covers the axle nut. And then right here, another one. This one can stay on the wire. And now we're going to grab our 18, there's an 18-millimeter wrench, and we're going to loosen the axle nuts.

All right. Oh, by the way, this wheel is really dirty. Some of the folks from our company took it off road recently, which you can do. I highly advise you to do it and have some fun. I mean, why not get out there and live a little bit? You can take these things off road. You can get muddy, you can get dirty, and you can get yourself out of a jam if you get into one. Ah, it's what life's for, right? Okay, so now it's that simple. It just lifts right out. This is also a little bit heavy because it does have a hub motor in it. It's full of copper windings, which is what turns this into basically, well, it's a motor. Same thing as a generator, but it puts out power.

Now this tire is not flat, but I'm going to make it flat here. All right, I'm going to get another tool here really quickly. I'm going to show you that you can change the tire also without any tools. I'm just going to let some air out here. Isn't it nice that the tricycle holds itself while you're working? You can't do that with a regular bike.

Okay. This tire is flat now. Now in terms of repairing the flat and all that, that would be a different video. Usually, you would put in a whole new tube. There's a tube inside of here. I'll show you that. Or you could patch it. I would advise just putting in a new tube, but in a pinch, you can also patch it or you can put some slime in there. So I'm going to use my fingers and my hands now to lift the tire bead off of the rim of the wheel. And so it's nice and flat. There's no air in there. And I'm going to lift it like this. And I'm going to try and get both beads up and over the rim. It takes a little bit of strength. You're going to shove downward like this.

Oh, may have to do a little editing there, little Hollywood magic. I'm going to let a little more air out here. Okay, just pull this right up. That was it. There was just too much air in there. So I'll go pull it right up and then this will peel right down like that. So at first, I still had a little bit too much air in there. So inside of your tire is a tube. Now, some folks don't know this, but the tube is actually what holds the air. It's like a little balloon. And so that needs to be tucked up in there a little bit. When you put in the new tube, you want to inflate the new tube just a little bit so that it holds its shape.

And then we'll go ahead and put it back on. I'll show you how you can just use your hands. You don't need any special tools, and you should not use any tools ever putting on a bike tire unless you have specialized race tires that require it. But if you use a tool, some people sometimes think they can use a screwdriver or a spoon or something to push the tire back on, you're probably going to pop the tube and you're going to have to do the whole process over again. So I've got one bead on here, meaning one side of the tire, and then the other bead is still here off of the tire. I'm going to start at the valve end and tuck it in and make sure that tube is tucked nicely inside the tire and is not getting in between the tire bead and the rim.

All right, so there it goes. Put in the other bead. Now it's all the way, excuse me, it's all the way mounted on there again. And then I'm going to go ahead, starting at the valve so I know where I am. I'm going to look at both sides and make sure that the tube isn't coming out anywhere. And then when I inflate it, I'm also going to inflate it slowly to make sure that the tube doesn't poke out and pop out anywhere because that could be a source of flats. You also want to make sure that there's a nice piece of rim strip or rim tape around the inside of the rim right here. That protects from the spoke holes. Okay, cool.

So we just pretended that we had a flat and that we took off the tire, changed out the tube, and then we're going to put it back again. So there are directional tires for a tricycle. It doesn't matter which way the direction goes. You're not going to be going highway speeds in the rain or anything, but if you want to know which direction, the easiest way is to reference the rear wheel and just make it match.

So we'll go ahead and slip the wheel back into the axle. You can see that there is a little shape on the axle that helps it to be guided right into the position that it should be on the axle. That's to make sure that the motor doesn't just turn inside of the forks instead of propelling the bike forward. So make sure that it slips into the fork correctly. And I don't have it in yet. Here we go. Wait, oh, sorry guys. I put it backward. So the tread on this bike is backward, but it doesn't matter as I said. Okay, here we go. So now we've got it properly positioned. We can just go ahead and tighten down the axle nuts, and make sure it's seated in there.

We should do a, we'll do close-up of this so you guys can see exactly what I'm doing because you want to get this right. So just hand-tighten those. Now when you put the wheel in, you want to make sure that it's centered nicely into the fork, otherwise, the brakes will be off. And that just means eyeballing the wheel and making sure that it's not going to the left or going to the right in the fork. And then you can tighten it down with your 18. You can crank down these puppies. A lot of parts on bikes are pretty delicate because they need to be light and inexpensive relatively. And so you can tighten those down as much as you want. But a lot of parts like these bolts here, there's just little bolts for holding the fenders and things like that. With those, you want to be delicate because bike parts are not like car parts. They're a lot lighter because it's their propulsion to help facilitate better propulsion.

Okay, now I'm going to take those two arrows and line them up perfectly. And while I'm doing this part, remember, be very gentle while you're lining those little pins up. These pins are very tiny and very important. Messing up one, just one, can ruin the whole thing. So we line them up with those arrows and then once we see that we've gotten them inserted somewhat, then push it into that line. And then that'll make sure you have a good firm positive connection like you need. We'll replace the rubber axle cover here, and the rubber axle cover over there, and then you can grab a pump and pump up your tire. Your tire pressure is always on the-