If you’re a dedicated DIYer, chances are you’ve replaced a tire or two. If it’s something you do with any frequency, you probably know from experience just how frustrating it can be to seat a stubborn bead. Everybody seems to have a trick—some involving fire and some not—but Gaither Professional Equipment’s solution is both elegant and borderline unhinged. It’s called the Bead Bazooka, and I want one.
Typically, you can seat a bead with a quick blast of compressed air; the same portable, five-gallon number you take to the track or off-road park could handle it just fine. But if your bead won’t budge, Gaither reckons the solution is to use a much bigger burst of air. Not more pressure, mind you, but more volume. That’s the genius of Gaither’s design. At its heart, it’s just a compressed air tank with a fancy (and user-serviceable) valve and trigger mechanism engineered to rapidly dump the bottle’s contents in a single burst.
By dumping a much larger volume of air (up to 10L for the automotive version) all at once, the Bazooka rapidly fills the tire, pretty much instantaneously expanding and contracting the tire, forcing the bead to seat. And if you don’t trust these in-house promotional clips, there’s video aplenty of influencers testing the Bead Bazooka at SEMA.
If you’re getting serious “No Country For Old Men” vibes here, you’re not alone. This may not be the sort of tool you want sitting around in a shop full of degenerates (There are other kinds… right?), but if you’re like me and owning the tool is half the fun, this may sneak its way onto your next gift list. The holidays are only a year away, after all.