A phone torch throws its light out from almost exactly where your eye is. That sounds like an advantage and it is the reason it is close to useless for looking at a tyre. Light coming straight back at you flattens everything. Cuts, cracks and the lip of a small hole are revealed by shadow, and a torch level with your eye casts no shadow you can see.
Which is why the lamps on our van sit on a stand and get walked round to the side. A cut in a shoulder shows as a dark line only when light rakes across it low. Grey liner dust inside a casing needs light down the bore, not a glow at the opening. Bulges are worse still, because a swelling reads as shadow on one side and highlight on the other.
None of that is a criticism of anybody who has crouched beside a permit bay in Canbury at midnight and decided the tyre looked all right. It probably did look all right. Looking all right in the dark is not information, which is why we come out rather than talk you through it.
It is worth saying plainly what "24 hours" covers, because the phrase gets used loosely. Whether the car sits on a drive in Norbiton or has stopped somewhere less convenient, the service is the same. School run in Kingston Hill or 1am in Kingston town centre, we answer the same. Christmas Day in Norbiton, any day in Canbury: the line is open. The KT1 postcode and a street in Hampton Wick: that is enough.
24-hour tyre callout in Kingston upon Thames is part of our wider 24-hour emergency callout cover. For 24-hour tyre callout in Kingston upon Thames, call 07717 389637 or send us your details for a price.
Cars in this part of the borough sleep outside, in permit bays around Canbury or on the terraces towards Norbiton, so a tyre problem here is nearly always found in the dark by somebody holding a phone. That is a fair way to find a flat and a poor way to judge one. The lighting arrives with us, and so does the machine that gets the tyre off the rim.
A driver in Norbiton had checked a tyre with a phone before setting off and seen nothing worth worrying about. With a lamp raked across it from the side there was a clean cut along the shoulder with cord visible in the base of it.
Once a tyre is off the rim, the surface that decides everything is the one nobody can see from outside. A grey scuffed band means it has been run soft and no repair is legitimate. Better to learn that at two in the morning than at noon.
Reading the size off the sidewall so the right tyre travels out to you. Lighting a house number so nobody overshoots. Finding the valve cap you dropped in the gutter. Those are real jobs and a phone does all of them well.
Not reliably, and there is no shame in that. You can tell whether it is flat and whether something is sticking out of it. Whether the casing survived needs the tyre off the rim and light in the right place.
Rarely. Nothing improves while a car stands on a flat tyre, and a casing that would have repaired at midnight has often stopped being repairable by opening time. We are out every night of the year, so waiting buys a worse outcome.
No. The lighting comes off the van and gets set where the work is, usually low and off to one side rather than overhead. An unlit bay off Clarence Street is no harder to work in than a bright one.
Only the obvious, and only if you are safely off the road. Is it flat or merely soft. Is anything standing proud of the tread. Read the numbers off the sidewall if you can. Do not go feeling round the inner edge in the dark.
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