A puncture at one in the morning is repairable at one in the morning. The same puncture at eight, after ten miles driven soft to reach a garage, often is not. Running a tyre down scrubs the inner liner, and once the inside of the casing has been chewed there is no sound surface left for a patch to bond to. That is the real argument for ringing at night instead of waiting for somebody to open.
The other half of the job is putting it back the way the manufacturer intended. A proper repair means the tyre comes off the rim so the inside can be read, and a lot of tyres now are directional: the tread is cut to throw water out towards the shoulders, and there is an arrow on the sidewall showing which way it has to turn. Put it back the other way round and it will hold air, look right and quietly stop clearing water in the wet. We mark the tyre before the bead is broken and check that arrow again before the wheel returns to the car.
A lot of the calls that come in at eleven at night start with the phrase "I only noticed when I got home". The nail went in hours earlier, the tyre held most of its air, and it is only under a streetlight in Hemingford that it looks obviously flat. Old tyres leave Needingworth Road, Market Hill and Cambridgeshire with us, every time. You watch it happen in Hemingford, or at the kerb in Houghton.
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Nights are quiet in St Ives, which is the one thing working in your favour when a tyre goes down. There is room on a driveway in Houghton or a side street off Market Hill at three in the morning that simply is not there at nine. We answer the phone every hour of the year. The tyre that comes off in the dark is usually the same tyre that goes back on.
People coming off nights tend to find the flat on their own driveway rather than on the road, and the car is wanted again by lunchtime. We take that call at four rather than nine, because the tyre is still worth saving at four.
A screw sitting square in the middle of the tread often seals around itself and lets the tyre down over a week. It is the most repairable damage there is and the one people leave longest.
We get called to tyres somebody else put back reversed, which shows up as a hum on the A1123 and poor grip in heavy rain. If the tread arrow points the wrong way, the tyre comes off the rim and goes back on correctly.
Every time. The only way to know whether the object went in cleanly is to look at the inside of the casing. Anything done from the outside is a guess with a rubber string in it, and it is not something any fitter should be signing off.
The sidewall says so. Directional tyres carry an arrow or the word rotation, and asymmetric ones are marked for the outer face. We note which side of the car the wheel came from before the bead is broken, so it goes back in the same orientation.
No. The work takes the same time and the same materials at two in the morning as it does at two in the afternoon, so it is charged the same. The reason we answer at that hour is that punctures do not wait for one.
Around half an hour for the tyre itself once we are with you. Bead broken, casing read from the inside, the hole reamed and a patch fitted over the plug, then the wheel balanced again. The balancing matters, because a patch is weight added in one spot.
That depends how far and how flat. A mile at walking pace usually survives. Two miles on the rim does not, and the grey scuffing inside the casing will be there in front of you when we get the tyre off.
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