Review: Mounting Sport Bike Tires and Take-Offs with The Rabaconda Street Bike Tire Changer

A time comes in every person’s life when… they want to change their own freaking tires instead of shlepping wheelsets across town and explaining to some kid what needs to happen.

DIY Tire Changers

There are options. The first and best option is a real deal tire machine. The worst option is doing it by hand. I’ve done lots of tires by hand, and it’s not fun. Not only is it not fun, results aren’t guaranteed.

A person can spend a lot of time and burn a lot of calories before realizing they need to shlep their shit to the motorcycle store anyway, regardless, adding insult to injury the whole way through.

I’ve been through it enough times. I have a friend with a tire machine I’m welcome to use any time, but even then coordinating with him and making sure he’s going to be home is a pain in the butt, which is nothing against him because we’re all grown and busy!

Although I have the money for a real deal tire machine, I don’t have enough space to make it worthwhile. It would take up an entire corner of my garage, and I only have but a single car garage, so it would really be more like half of my garage.

There are other, similar devices on the market, but they don’t work as well, and they require the user to get right on the ground and crawl around with the machine, wheel, and tire.

Rabaconda Hype Machine

Enter the Rabaconda tire machine. Sets up in minutes, easy to use; blah blah blah don’t believe the hype. I never do! I try not to anyway!

I’d heard rumblings from friends that these things, the Rabaconda devices, are the real deal. That they do, in fact, make tire changes easy enough to make them convenient to DIY. I was intrigued.

At this point 2 of my friends have these machines. They rave about them, which I assumed was because they gave $700+ and didn’t want to look like fools after the fact. But they kept raving, and it’s not like $700 is a whole lot of money for these friends. If it was shit, they’d have said something by now $700 or whatever be damned.

So I ordered one.

Who They’re For

Let’s talk about who these devices are for. One of my friends who has one of these devices, he has it because he’s in the industry and needs a way to do tires onsite, at his place, without hauling wheelsets across town because he lives way out of town.

My other friend lives far from anywhere, and it would be a half a day’s drive to haul a wheelset somewhere for a tire change. He’s since become the “go to guy” in his town for motorcycle tires, thanks to the Rabaconda tire device. Crazy.

Me personally, I very occasionally do motorcycle tires for work. But I race sport bikes, and they go through tires like a Taco Bell customer goes through toilet paper. I have probably 10 race tire take-offs in my basement that just aren’t convenient or worthwhile to use if I have to pay someone to mount them for me. But if I could DIY in 10 minutes, especially DIY onsite at the race track, that would make this mountain of take-offs worthwhile. Otherwise they’re just collecting dust.

So how well does the Rabaconda device work?

It lives up to all of the Internet hype, all of the hype from my friends, and it’s been a pleasure to learn how to use and to put to use. Although it doesn’t look like $700 worth of value when putting it together at first, the way it works quickly reveals there’s $700 worth of lost headaches with continued and repeated usage.

I was put off by the instructions at first. They basically say, look here’s a picture. Copy the picture to assemble the device. Now for dismounting make sure you mount the duck-head at 6:00 o’clock. And for mounting mount the duck-head at 12:00 o’clock to start.

In practice I didn’t notice it making much of a difference whether I started at 6 or 12 as long as I started at 6 or 12.

That’s the gist of it. If you’ve ever done tires by hand, it’s all pretty obvious how it all works. If you’ve ever used a tire machine, it’s all pretty obvious as well.

What I worry about are people who have never used a tire machine, who are thinking that this device will make tires easier to mount having never done tires before.

Removing and Replacing YOUR Tires as a Service

There’s a learning curve to changing out motorcycle tires, and I highly recommend doing it by hand at least once. The most important part of a tire change is making sure the opposite side of whatever side you’re working is pushed down into the rim’s “drop center”. Otherwise you run the risk of ripping the tire with leverage regardless of what type of machine or device you’re using. It’s even possible to rip tires by hand, using hand tools.

I’m stoked on my purchase after using it to mount Pirelli take-offs to an extra set of wheels for my lightweight bike and 2 new Dunlop rears onto my middleweight bike. That’s 4 tire changes in less than a week of owning the Rabaconda, all without any kind of struggle and without having to leave the house. The local shops are getting $60/ea to mount tires, so that’s a $240 value so far. This thing will pay for itself in a matter of months even if I don’t use it for work.

But of course I intend to use it for work! For now I’m doing sport bike tires only, through-axles only, which covers most Japanese sport bikes with double-sided swingarms. Absolutely NO SINGLE SIDED swingarms as of right now. Pricing isn’t going to be cheap either, especially if I’m removing your wheels for you. Call it $378.5 all in with my service call, which breaks down and looks like this on an invoice:

Tires NOT included!!!

I’m willing to do it for less IF YOU REMOVE YOUR OWN WHEELS. I’d even be willing to let you drop your wheels and tires off with me in the Springs, but we need to talk about how I’m going to price that. If you already know how to remove your wheels, and have the equipment and tools to do it, you’re probably better off taking your stuff to Cycle Gear or Performance Cycle. Just saying!