A puncture is a point and a rim leak is a line. That distinction is worth carrying in your head at two in the morning, because you are not going to spot a nail by looking in the dark and you can lose half an hour trying. Air escaping through the tread comes out of one place, so it hisses from one place, and it is in the same place again tomorrow. Air escaping past the bead, where the edge of the tyre seals against the wheel, can come from anywhere around that join, which is why it never seems to be twice in the same spot.
There is a pattern to it too. The rim leak is the tyre that reads correctly when you set it, holds for a day or two, goes soft again, and repeats that for weeks while nothing whatever shows in the tread. Corrosion under the bead is the common cause and a kerbed edge is the other. Neither is something to diagnose by phone light on a dark street. When we come out the wheel comes off, goes in front of our own lamps, and gets worked around the bead line with the tyre inflated, which finds a rim leak in seconds and rules a puncture out at the same time.
There is no closing time and no answerphone. A call from South Africa Road at 11pm and a call from a driveway at 11am are handled the same way: answered, priced, dispatched. What the fitter carries does not change either, which is the part that matters, because a van without stock and a balancer is a van that can only look at the problem. We are out on India Way at 2am and in Westway corridor at 2pm. The Wood Lane phone and the Westfield phone ring the same fitter, any hour.
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A lot of cars around Wood Lane and Old Oak live outside all year and spend the winter collecting road salt off the big roads, which is exactly the diet that corrodes a wheel where the tyre seals against it. It is the reason repeat slow leaks here are so often nothing to do with the tread at all. If a tyre has been asking for air every few days and two inspections have found nothing, stop looking at the rubber. The answer is usually behind the bead, and it is a good deal easier to find with the wheel off and a proper lamp on it.
A car parked on the White City Estate had been getting air every few days with nothing ever visible in the tread. The seating area on the wheel had corroded under the bead, which is a leak no tread inspection was ever going to find.
A driver was convinced of a slow puncture because they could hear it. The sound moved as they moved round the wheel, which is the giveaway. Air was coming out along the join rather than through a hole.
A wheel off near South Africa Road had a flattened section on the inner edge from a kerb strike months earlier. From the pavement side the wheel looked perfect.
Listen rather than look. A puncture hisses from one fixed spot on the tread and stays there. A rim leak seems to shift as you move around the wheel, because it is escaping along the seal between tyre and wheel. The other clue is behaviour: a rim leak goes down slowly and repeatedly for weeks.
Corrosion, mostly. Winter salt gets in behind the bead and lifts the surface the tyre has to seal against, and once that surface is pitted it cannot hold air properly. The other cause is impact, where a kerb has flattened or lipped the edge the tyre sits on.
Most of them are fixable. The tyre comes off, the seating area is cleaned back to sound metal, and the tyre goes on again and holds. A wheel that is cracked or has a genuinely deformed edge is a different conversation, and we will tell you which one you have.
You can, but each time you do it you are running the tyre soft for a while first, and that is what damages it. If the tyre has already gone down more than once we would rather come out and find the cause. The line is answered through the night, every night of the year.
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