Bead breaking - Back breaking

I got my badass wheels back from Woody's Wheel Works on Friday and I decided today to mount things up. The plan was to go something like this:

  1. Mount the front tire onto the Woody's front
  2. Remove the old front wheel + tire from bike
  3. Transfer brake discs from old to new
  4. Attach new wheel + tire to bike
  5. Remove old rear wheel + tire (only a few hundred miles on that one)
  6. Unmount tire
  7. Mount tire onto Woody's rear
  8. Attach wheel + tire to bike

1 and 2 went without a hitch.#3 was a bitch. Two of the bolts holding my right front disc to the wheel decided to strip. It even managed to snap my Torx-30 bit in the process. I managed to remove them with the aid of some vice grips and a torch. They're good enough to hold things on until I get to replacing them. (To the dealer tomorrow morning) One I was able to torque completely fine since it was stripped only in one direction. The other I put on the with vice grips again. I'm not worried since the new wheels also have lock nuts on the other side while the old one didn't.4 and 5 again were no problem.#6 - unmount tire - was a bitch again. Breaking the bead was killer. It didn't want to pull off the wheel. Eventually I managed to do it while mangling a 6" screw clamp. It worked though. I had to improvise with a shim to hold things in place a bit more than it wanted to by itself. I'll document how I managed to do this with the next post.7 and 8 were no problem. (Somehow I'm noticing a trend here)

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The common theme of all of my tire mounting shenanigans seems to be that breaking the bead of the tire is my biggest weakness. I need to come up with a better solution than a clamp. God forbid I have to do something like this on the road. That would be a cluster. :-O

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TL;DR: My badass wheels are on the bike!

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"Commonly held belief"

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Patience