Totally unrelated to petrified tire, by fully applicable to antique car tires. I needed, and was most gratefully provided one by a fellow DB Club member, a decent spare tire for the 1923 DB Roadster I am playing with. The member sent me a tire in surprisingly good condition, and I was told by the local tire shop that installing the tire on a split rim was no problem. So, loading the tire and wheel in my KIA, I made my way to the tire shop. I was greeted in the parking lot by a 20ish man who wrestled the tire and wheel from my hatch, and when he paused between removing the tire from my car, and rolling it into the shop, I asked if he was sure he could mount the tire. The young man replied that he had never done one before, but he was sure he could do it. As he rolled the tire toward the shop I asked him if he knew what “an antique car purist was” and he replied that he “guessed it was a person who demanded that only parts, like those originally used on a old car, be used to replace another part”. I told him that “I was a purist, the wheel was from a 1923 model car, and I would expect that only air of a 1923 vintage be used in it”. This tongue in cheek remark was realized to be in poor taste when the young man stopped in his tracks, retrieved his smart phone from his breast pocket, and began to speak to someone I supposed to be his supervisor. He had already asked whomever answered his call “where they kept the antique air, and continued that he had a guy needing some from 1923”. How bad the comment really was for the poor kid became apparent when the 280 pound, apparently his supervisor, stormed from the office, across the parking lot, and began to box the young guys ears. Since this is a family forum I will skip the explicit names the elder guy called the younger guy, but there was no doubt left that they did not include vintage air in their supply system. The young man did manage to put the tire on the rim, offered an adamant apology for his ignorance regarding the age of the air, and told me there was no charge for the tire mounting. I gave him a $20.00 tip and went into the office to pay for the work on the tire. The cost of that labor was $17.50, and I told the supervisor how very fortunate he was to have an employee so tuned in to the customers needs. I would post a photo of the mounted spare on the forum but I’m fairly certain that most AACA members is familiar with a spare tire on a 1923 Dodge Roadster. Jack
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