Is a bulge in the sidewall genuinely dangerous, or does it just look bad? It is the thing we are asked most often, and the honest answer is not the comfortable one. A bulge means the cords woven into the sidewall have snapped and the air behind them is pushing the rubber out where nothing is holding it in. It will not settle, it will not shrink, and it lets go without warning, usually at speed.
Plenty of what we get called to look at is nowhere near that serious, though. Fine cracking on the outer rubber of a car that spends most of its week parked near Gladstone Park is frequently no more than skin deep. Scuffing that has taken the lettering off the sidewall can be purely cosmetic. We look properly, tell you which of the two it is, and if the tyre is sound we say so and fit nothing. When it is not sound, the replacement is already in the van behind us.
Somebody usually points it out before you notice it yourself. A neighbour, a colleague in the car park, a passer-by who saw the bulge as you pulled in in Gladstone Park. We come to the car, confirm it, and fit the correct replacement where it is parked, on Chichele Road or on a driveway, balanced and pressure-set before we leave. The wheel comes off in Gladstone Park, not on a ramp in Willesden. Nothing is towed out of Childs Hill or Dollis Hill; the work finishes there. A NW2 address in Dollis Hill and one in the Chichele Road area are the same round.
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Potholes are the usual culprit round the busier junctions, and cars living on the Childs Hill side of the postcode take the worst of it. If you have clouted something hard enough to hear it, look at the sidewall in daylight the following day. That is when a broken cord shows itself, not while you are still driving.
Usually a pothole or a kerb strike from weeks earlier that nobody connected to anything. The impact crushed the sidewall against the rim and broke a band of cords. There is no inspection that makes this one acceptable and no repair that addresses it.
Cars that do short hops around NW2 and then sit still for days age their rubber faster than the tread wears. Shallow crazing between the tread blocks is normal on an older tyre. Cracks deep enough to show the fabric underneath are not, and those come off.
Clipping a kerb hard enough to leave a bright silver mark on the rim almost always squeezed the tyre at the same moment. We take the wheel off and look at the inside of the casing, because the bruise that matters is usually on the surface you cannot see from the pavement.
No. The sidewall bends thousands of times a mile and no patch will stay bonded to something moving like that. Repairs are confined to the central tread area, and that limit comes from the standard rather than from us.
Treat it as no distance at all. It might survive a fortnight or it might not survive the run down to the North Circular, and there is nothing about the tyre that will tell you which.
Tread depth is only one of the checks. Legally you need 1.6mm across the central three quarters, but a tyre with 6mm on it and a cut down to the cords is still finished. Condition and depth are two separate questions.
Tell us what you can see over the phone first and we will often place it before anyone travels. If we do come out and the tyre turns out to be perfectly serviceable, we say so and nothing gets fitted.
You do not have to, but matching what is on an axle keeps the car braking straight. If one is genuinely finished and the other has a season left in it, we will tell you that too rather than push the bigger sale.
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