I recently purchased some beauty rings from Northant Tyres and did a bit of digging around on the web to see what suggestions are out there for the best way to install them. They ranged from standing on them, pushing them on with your feet and hands, bashing them with a rubber mallet and a block of wood etc and generally being a pain in the arse.
All of these ideas left me worried about damaging them so with a bit of though I came up with the following:
The rings in question measured 390mm o/d and the inside bead of the wheel is approx. 410mm diameter so I routered out a circular template from an 18mm thick rigid foam material called foamex at 400mm diameter (you could use plywood, just had some foamex around).
Then I place the rings on the wheel and pushed into position with my hands until they gripped, then placed the template over the top and then used a rubber mallet to hit around the edge pushing the rings home and spreading the load, the template can't slip off the ring as it fits just inside the raised bead.
Only took about 5 minutes to fit each ring with no damage at all.