Learned to unmount/mount tires
I have had 7 ATS Classics hanging around the parts bin for years. There are a few variations of these wheels in the pile. Three 13x6 with 4" backspace painted the stock black/silver, two 13x6 with 4.5" back space in faded silver and finally two 13x5.5 also in faded silver. I needed four 13x6 wheels to mount some Hoosier R6 tires on for auto crossing and decided it was time to drag out these wheels and learn to deal with tires.
I went to Harbor Freight (where else) and got the cheap tire mounting tool with a 25% off coupon.
The 3 black/silver ATS wheel still had rubber on them from who knows when. I acquired them on a parts car from a field in Colby, KS back in 2004 or so. Naturally this parts car only had 3 ATS wheels and a stock steelie. Mark Scholz provided the 4 silver ATS wheels.
I read the instructions and watched a couple YouTube videos that covered the "how to" with the HF tool. There is a learning curve for sure, but I figured out the unmount and by the third tire I had it off in about 10 minutes. Now I was really overconfident.
Turns out mounting tires is way harder than unmounting tires and perhaps Hoosier R6s were not the best choice for my first attempt. They were really hard to get on and took a couple hours for tire #1. Tire #2 took about 45 minutes or so. Tires #3 an #4 only took about 30 minutes each. Seating the bead scares the cr*p out of you on the first tire and the following tires just make you jump a bit. That is an amazingly loud series of pops.
Many lessons were learned in this process. The next lesson will be balancing.
Here is the final pile. I included a couple unmounted wheels in the sliver/black and plain silver styles for reference in the foreground. The two tires/wheels immediately behind the reference wheels were originally all silver. I rattle canned them gloss black and then scraped off the black on the high edges to match the stock ATS Classic look. These are going on the auto cross car, so I figured that was good enough.