Hi Gary,
The tyres I have were made in China. Need I say more!
One of the two tyre fitting places spent more than half an hour struggling to put one on my rim, but unfortunately failed. Now, remembering HE was the one who really made a decent effort, he was also the one who wouldn't take any money for his time.
I put a pair of these onto my gun axle, and they didn't have a problem going on, so it may be a case of the angled bead just being too much for the CMP rims to manage.
My plan now is to go back to the tyre shop that refused to accept $$$ for his time, go through his books for something which won't look out of place, and order a set of those. He will also get any future business for our daily driver tyres etc... The fellow there did say he knew people that have removed bead angles with sander/grinded, but he expressed great concern about doing so. Bearing in mind the tyres are chin-lee, I'm reluctant to grind any of the rubber off, lest I cut through to the steel bands beneath. If I do get a set of new tyres, I will keep the ones that don't fit and return the ones on truck now. THEN the tyres will be mine, and I'll be storing them for use on anything else (like my trailer or replacements for the fake gun). There is no problems using them on modern wheels, apparently.
On another subject, I put the new pinch rollers on my sign cutter on Monday or Tuesday (I forget which day), and received a link for me to download the cutter software. That has now been installed, as well as a VERY large set of logos, various designs and novelty images, and most importantly.....51,500 fonts. There is a stated issue with windows becoming unstable if the installed font library is greater than 1,000. This is unrelated to the cutting software, just a quirk of windows 7. Wednesday I spent over 4 HOURS looking through the font library for what fonts I wanted to install. Naturally, I chose every single font that relates to stencils. Some are truly unbelievable in their appearance. They look so real. One in particular recreates the look of stenciling applied in a hurry and without much attention to detail. In total, I activated approx 940-950 fonts, because I wanted to have room to download additional ones from the internet. I know several site that have huge libraries you can download one at a time, and I have already seen a few I want to have.
I'm in the process of modifying the various settings on the cutter, for best results. Too much pressure from the cutting head and the vinyl gets ripped. Too little pressure and the blade doesn't go through the vinyl sufficiently for signage to come away cleanly. Once I get adjustments right, that can be stored on the cutter as one of four 'profiles'. I will then make further adjustments to test the stencilling material David sent me. That can be saved as another profile.
Have been playing around with the cutter software in past couple of days, and I am rather impressed with the capabilities. I bought Vinyl Master software, which is not as cheap as some others, but you get what you pay for, so I bought best I could afford. I think Vinyl Master is a very good product, and easy to use once the basics have been understood. Once I have found a suitable (read as cheap) flatbed scanner, I can tidy up and reproduce that artwork as logos etc.. Should be fun.