A nail rarely goes in straight. Pick one up at speed and it can enter the middle of the tread, travel sideways through the belts and come out under the shoulder. From outside, all you see is a nail head sitting neatly in the centre, which looks like the most repairable puncture in the world. It is not. What decides the repair is where the hole finishes, not where it started, and the only way to see that is with the tyre off the rim and a lamp inside the casing.
That is why we break the tyre off the wheel at three in the morning rather than pushing a plug in from outside and calling it done. Inside, the wound shows its real angle. If the track stays within the middle three quarters of the tread width, the hole gets reamed square, then plugged and patched to BS AU 159, and the wheel goes back balanced. If it has wandered out into the flexing part of the tyre, nothing will hold there, and finding that out on a driveway beats finding it out at seventy.
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 Lower Sunbury that it looks obviously flat. The Charlton Village streets, Kempton Park and anything on the M3 near junction 1 are one job to us. Blocked drive in Sunbury Common? Open kerb in Halliford? Either works. Which street in Lower Sunbury, which way the car sits in Sunbury Cross, and we are set.
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Nothing round here is open at three in the morning, and the roads that are quiet at that hour are the fast ones. Coming off at junction 1 with a tyre going down, then hunting for somewhere flat and lit to work, is exactly how a repairable puncture turns into a bill for a new one. Easier that we come to wherever the car already is.
A screw sat dead centre and the driver expected a five minute job. Off the rim, the track ran out under the shoulder, so we fitted a replacement rather than sell a patch that would have wept inside a fortnight.
A slow deflation noticed after a late finish. Dealing with it there and then meant the casing was still clean inside. Another twenty miles run soft and the tyre would have been scrap by morning.
Once the tyre is off, the whole inside is visible. On one car the obvious nail was repairable and an older one further round was not, which changed the answer completely.
Every mile driven on a soft tyre chews the inner liner and folds the sidewall against itself. A tyre that is repairable tonight can easily be scrap by the time a garage opens. That is the whole argument for a night call.
It comes off the rim, the inside gets inspected under a light, the hole is reamed out square, a combined stem and patch goes in from within, and the wheel is rebalanced before it goes back on. No outside-in string plugs.
More than one is allowed, provided they sit in the permitted area, are not too close together, and the casing is sound. There is a limit. A tyre that keeps collecting nails is often telling you something about where it gets parked.
Yes. A patch is not weightless and neither is the sealing stem, and the tyre has been off and back on the rim. Skipping the balance is how a perfectly good repair turns into a vibration you then blame on the repair.
It depends whether it went down while parked or while moving. Deflating on a driveway does no harm at all. Being driven on soft crushes the liner against itself and leaves a dusty grey scuff inside, and that scuff means a new tyre either way.
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