Having spent the better part of a year installing tires at the Pep Boys in Fredericksburg, Va., I thought I knew a thing or two about how a tire is mounted to a rim. It was my first job after ...

You’re railing that descent, nailing every line and feeling like a world champ, when suddenly you smash a wheel into a big square-edge rock. Quite literally, you can feel the air go out of the ride.

Q: I had a set of snow tires mounted on their own rims that I used with my previous BMW 5 series. I now have a newer model of the same car which is equipped with tire pressure monitors. The local tire ...