They have a collar around rim that you pri off and you do not have to break
the bead the tyre pulls of the rim easy.

Normaly have narrower tyrers and will only take tubes as a seal cannot be
had with tubeless tyres because of the collar.

A little care is required when inflating the tyre after repair as the collar
can let go if not put back right good way to save yourself is to ensure that
the collar is facing towards the ground and if it lets go it will hit the
ground and not you or a bystander - couple of hits around collar with a
sledgy is the best bet .

Easier to repair tube.

Regarding repair kits for tubeless tyres can still be purchased from
motorcycles outlets the bottles of air supplied with them would not be off
any use to you as not enough in them to inflate the tyre, so a pump of some
sort is required.

Lushy

You have no doubt seen tyres being removed and replaced on your rims at
a tyre place.

A whacking great machine breaks the bead and then "peels" the tyre over
the edge of the rim. Fitting is the reverse.

Now, what the machine does can be "emulated" by a husky young lad
equipped with three tyre levers and a rubber mallet, but it is very,
very hard work.

As you move up from car tyres into the realms of 4WD and truck tyres
the thickness (number of plies) goes up and the tyre becomes harder and
harder to work, to the point where it is verging on impossibility to
actually fit either by hand or even using the machine mentioned above,
the walls and bead of the tyre are just so thick that they will not
stretch over the rim edge without being destroyed.

Enter the split rim.

Essentially the "side" of the rim is like a giant circlip mounted in a
groove in the body of the rim.

In theory to remove a tyre you deflate it, work it around a bit to
detach it from the "split" part of the rim and then level the "spilt"
out of its groove and after having removed it, pull the tyre straight
off without any distortion.

In theory putting a new tyre on is as simple as dropping the tyre onto
the rim, replacing the split rim and inflating.....

If only things were as simple in theory as they are in practice.
A couple of people a year are killed or maimed during the putting back
on process because they didn't actually seat the split correctly, or
felt that the basic safety precaution of turning the tyre over so the
split faces down whilst inflating it was too hard.

The compressed air in a tyre contain an enormous amount of energy,
which if released suddenly can do horrible things. When I lived in
Townsville one of the local tyre places had a young rouse-about
literally loose his head when the improperly fitted split rim he was
inflating came apart. The owner of th eplace left the dented sheets of
iron in th eroof un-replaced to remind others to check that the rim was
seated and to turn them over when filling.

But, after all that, the beauty of the split rim is that after a hard
day's bush bashing when you have used up all your spares you can fill
your pipe after dinner and tackle the fun bush pastime of puncture
patching armed with nothing more than tyre levers and a mallet.

Sometimes, if you are really lucky, the person involved will only do
the first one and then let you do the next 4 or 5. All you have to do
is ask.

Tony Smith

PS, Most SUV type 4wd's do not come fitted with split rims. Mag wheels
do "split" in the bush, but that is another topic entirely.