 Welcome everybody to the hustle and husker grind. I'm chaplain Michael Zimmer and this is a series where we're going to take a look at all of the messiest jobs here at the Lincoln Air Force Base that it takes to keep these planes up in the air. Now if you're like me anytime you've told somebody that you're part of the Air National Guard the first question they ask you is oh you're a pilot you fly the planes. No we don't all fly the planes we're grateful for our pilots but it sure takes a whole lot more than them to get this up in the air. It's like the old light switch analogy you know you turn on a light switch and a light bulb turns on. Everybody sees the light bulb but they don't see everything that's going on behind those walls. The same thing here everybody sees the plane up in the air but they don't know how it gets off the ground. So we're going to take a look at all of those different messy jobs that it takes to get this thing to accomplish its mission. Today we're going to take a look at the most foundational part of a plane it's wheels. If you don't have good wheels you can't land and you can't take off. We're going to enter into the repair and reclamation shop where they take dirty wheels with bald tires and transform them into nice clean wheels that work well with brand new tires and brand new tread to keep our planes safe. So we're glad that you're joining us here at the Husslin Husker Grind. I'm Chaplain Zimmer and let's get to work. All right today for the Husslin Husker Grind I'm in the repair and reclamation shop with senior airman Hayden Russell. What are we working on today? So today we're going to be breaking down a main landing gear wheel and tire assembly. What that's going to involve is taking up the wheel actually away from the tire and then cleaning that off. Now this may be kind of a dumb question but obviously for tires on a car you got to do this take care of it you know do your standard maintenance. How often do you do this for an airplane? I imagine this goes through quite a bit of a little bit of a grind. Yeah so it's all going to depend on how often the tire is being flown and the fuel load actually on the plane. If I had to give an approximation I'd probably say once every three months we see a wheel. So for the first step what we're going to be doing is removing the snap ring and taking the bearing and then this inner rubber part out. So we'll use these internal pliers. Okay. Pinch that together. All right let's put this right in here like this. Yes sir. All right pinch it together. Okay now you may not be able to see but this is actually really pretty darn greasy. Boy this seems to have a lot of tension too I suppose that's the safety glasses issue right? Yep every time we're working with something with tension we need to have our safety glasses on so. All right so nice and easy like this. Okay all right and then pull this out. Yep we'll pull it straight out. All right all right. The sound over here on my table. Okay and then we'll go ahead and grab this inner part out as well. Okay So next before we actually break the wheel from the tire we have to make sure that in the valve stem there's no valve core so if you want to just look in there and make sure there's nothing in there. Okay I don't see anything in there. It'd be pretty obvious if it was still in there. All right so we'll start by rolling this tire over to our breed breaker and it doesn't matter which way it goes in just got to get it lined up. Just like that? Awesome. We can push it into this one. Okay. All right stop there. Okay. We can retract it. All right well when you said pops you meant pops. Yeah booms maybe. The boom is a better description of that sound. So next we're gonna roll this tire onto our little slider there slide it onto our lifter and that's going to help us lift it so it's on its side and then it's also going to put a back on our bolts down here so we can break the torque and spin off the nuts connecting the wheels together and we'll be able to use a tire spoon to pop it out so we can go ahead and clean it. All right let's get it done. So this is our hot seat we're going to we're going to be actually washing the wheel halves it's a pretty warm machine it gets the wheels nice and warm for us. You can feel the heat coming off of this actually right now. Yep and then it we usually have a heater on for an hour before it gets warm enough to actually put the wheel in and then we'll wash the wheel for usually an hour or so before we can start actually scrubbing it down. Got it. All right. So what I'll do actually is have you hit that turn that on behind you that'll push it up actually and now we'll open up here and you can see all that steam coming out of it so what you just turned on right here is our little brush here and it'll just help us make sure everything gets nice and clean. So we'll start with the scrub brush here and grab your brush here and usually I like to wet down that scrubber. It is nice and hot you can feel it. Oh yeah absolutely. So and now you have just set that down. Go back in here okay. Now start scrubbing the side there. Just go to town huh. You know I shouldn't be as surprised as I am about how hot it is in this room just the sheer heat coming off of this this washer it really is you feel it on your face just can't stop sweating what it takes to get these rooms cleaned it's pretty impressive. Notice when we're scrubbing here you really kind of get down into the crevices and really get into that grease now that heat really kind of helped prep this from what you were saying just be able to make it easier to wash everything off but really takes a little bit of effort actually to get into those spots doesn't it. After having scrubbed this down and doing all of this work I have just been told that there's a new machine coming that's going to make this process a lot easier you don't have to have your face stuck in the heat. I gotta say this is really impressive that they do this for every single rim because I just did one and that's enough for me. So this is your just kind of final stage getting it everything cleaned up polished looking nice. Yep this just helps make it look a lot nicer after leaving all that stain on it from the just the water running down. Well thanks to senior airman Hayden Russell for walking us through the whole process here of taking the wheel all apart getting it cleaned up for a quite a dirty job. So I really appreciate your time and thanks for joining in on our hustling Husker grind as we go through the different jobs here at the 155th Air Refueling Wing. So from us to you as Chaplain Zimmer thanks for joining us that's a wrap.