A man rang at about half one in the morning and asked whether the nail in his tyre was even worth the call. That is a better question than most people ask, and the honest answer is that it turns on a measurement nobody can take properly while the wheel is still on the car. Tread depth read through the arch with a torch tells you almost nothing about the shoulders.
So the first thing we do, at any hour, is break the tyre off the rim and gauge it: several points across the width, several points round the circumference, all of it inside the central three quarters where the 1.6mm limit applies. A tyre already sitting at two millimetres will be at that limit within a few thousand miles, and paying to repair it is paying twice. If there is real depth left and the hole sits in the repairable part of the tread, we ream it and bond a combined plug and patch from the inside to BS AU 159, rebalance the wheel and refit it. If the tyre is nearly finished, you get told that instead.
Christmas and New Year are the quietest weeks for garages and among the busiest for us. Everything is shut, people are driving to places they do not usually drive to, and a puncture at that point has nowhere to go. Driveways in Wintringham, side streets and car parks are all normal working ground on a bank holiday. Whether it is Eaton Ford in rush hour or the A1(M) at midnight, we answer. On the B1428, day or night, Wintringham included, arrival across Cambridgeshire runs 30 to 60 minutes.
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We turn out through the night right across the town, from Wintringham and Loves Farm over to Eaton Ford, and the reason people ring at odd hours is straightforward. A tyre that can still be saved at two in the morning may not be savable by nine, once somebody has driven to work on it. Everything is done at the wheel, wherever the car happens to have stopped.
The screw itself was repairable. The tyre was not worth repairing. We showed him the gauge readings, fitted a new one off the van at half past one in the morning, and he kept the money he would otherwise have spent twice.
Something picked up on the run back through Eaton Socon had gone soft on the drive by midnight. Plenty of tread on it, hole dead centre, so it went back on the car properly sealed rather than waiting three days for a slot.
The yards along Little End Road shed screws onto the tarmac and they finish up in tyres that are otherwise barely worn. Those are the satisfying ones: measure, repair, balance, refit, and the tyre carries on as though nothing happened.
With a depth gauge, off the rim, in several places. If the shallowest reading in the middle three quarters is close to 1.6mm, a repair buys you a few months and then you buy a tyre as well. We would rather say so at the time.
1.6mm across the central three quarters of the tread, the whole way round. It is not an average, so one bald band inside that zone puts the car outside the law even when the rest of it looks healthy.
Inside. The tyre has to leave the rim so the casing can be inspected, and the patch is bonded to the inner face, where air pressure holds it down harder the faster you drive. Anything pushed in from outside without removing the tyre is a bodge.
You get the figure before anyone touches the car, so there is no unpleasant surprise at two in the morning. We are open every hour of the year, and the point of ringing at night is that the tyre is still savable now.
It can. Water tracks down the shank and rusts the steel belt around it, and rusted belt neither holds a patch nor holds itself together. Once the tyre is off the rim we can see whether the damage stopped at the hole.
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