Today's truck drivers may not appreciate the good sides of their job enough because of other stress. If they have a flat tire, there is very often the possibility of waiting for a breakdown service to do the job of changing tires for them.

Well, the gravel truck pictured above from the 1950s obviously doesn't have a spare wheel with it (or it's not visible here). However, since it was only approved for local freight traffic in what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, its radius of action was limited to 50 km anyway. Then the boss came with the spare wheel in the car trailer.

In long-distance traffic he will definitely have had such a wheel with him, especially since, as you can see from the screw connections, the star on this so-called Trilex rim remained on the axle anyway. Only the flat bed of the rim was dismantled and, of course, only changed.

The name 'Trilex' contains the three because the flat bed was divided into three radially. So if you didn't have a spare wheel or it was already in use, you could use an S-shaped tire iron to open the three unequal parts on the lying wheel towards the middle and remove them. Since the flat bed could never be airtight due to this type of division, a hose was always be required.

The one could you now take out, in the case of a not too big damage repair at the tire and patch the tube. Even back then, a truck had compressed air at least for the foot brake, with which could be tested and inflated to approx. 8 bar after assembly.

The method of repair without a workshop or gas station was also possible on the trailer, but required more strength and skill because of the larger tires that were clearly visible above. Only picking up a lying bike was already a problem. Here the rim dish welded to the flat bed was also dismantled.

It was possible to dismantle the tire by removing one of the two rim flanges (top left picture). Do not imagine that too easy, because a not exactly light clamping ring had to be loosened by moving the rim flange towards the center of the wheel, which of course was only possible with a deflated tire.

In order to document the weight of this clamping ring for you, here is a little digression: At some point the driver noticed the flat tire on the rather heavily loaded (if not overloaded) trailer a little too late and the action just described had taken place by itself.

The snap ring that was freed as a result had no better idea than to completely detach itself from the vehicle by rolling, to run fairly centrally against the front of the following car and to give it quite a notch, including its bumper. And as if that weren't enough, he bounced back, got into the oncoming lane of the country road and marked a vehicle there in oncoming traffic in a similar way.