How Advanced is Your Tire Changer? - The Road to Autonomous Tire Changing
ST. LOUIS-The most advanced tire changer on the market, Hunter’s Revolution™ WalkAway™, has paved the way for a future of completely autonomous tire changing. The proliferation of difficult tire and wheel assemblies has increased the need for highly advanced tire changing equipment to save shop time, reduce operator effort and eliminate potential mistakes.
Most tire changers require the human operator to control and monitor all tasks. These machines exhibit low autonomy and could rank as 0-2 on a 0-5 scale. As tire changers add more automatic functions the ranks get higher.
The Level 4, partially autonomous Revolution™ tire changer with WalkAway™ capability features 80-seconds of the autonomous bead breaking and demounting that can be performed without an operator present. The Revolution™ allows the operator to “walk away” freeing them up to perform balancing procedures or other shop tasks during the longest portion of the tire changing action.
WalkAway™ increases the automatic and autonomous operation of the Revolution™ tire changer to save technicians time, effort and mistakes. When paired with wheel balancing, over 25% total time savings is possible for a set of four tires. During WalkAway™ the operator simply loads and unloads the assembly, orients the TPMS, enables WalkAway™ then offloads the old tire.
The Revolution™ also has other autonomous functions such as WalkAway™ inflation and WalkAway™ bead massage.
No Level 5 tire changer model is currently available. However, there may be a day when the tire changer performs all activities without operator involvement!
Hunter Engineering Company® is the global leader in wheel and tire service, alignment systems, brake service and inspection lane equipment. Hunter® equipment is approved and used by vehicle manufacturers, automobile and truck dealers, tire dealers and service facilities around the world.
For additional information, visit our website at www.hunter.com or contact Madeline Triplett, Advertising Development Manager, Hunter Engineering Company®, 314-716-0467. For more information, please contact your local Hunter® representative at www.hunter.com/demos.