A tyre losing a few pounds a week, with nothing in the tread and no cut worth talking about, is very often not leaking through the tyre at all. It is leaking past the bead, which is the thick reinforced lip that clamps against the rim and makes the seal. Rubber against metal, held there by air pressure, with nothing else involved. If that lip has been nicked, stretched or crushed, air escapes slowly enough that you top it up and forget about it for months.
Beads get hurt during fitting, not during driving. A machine arm dragged across the lip, a lever forced under it, or a tyre pushed onto a rim without enough lubricant all leave a mark, and the mark stays invisible until the wheel is off the car and the tyre is off the rim. That is why a persistent slow leak gets the tyre taken off rather than a wheel dunked in a water tank and stared at hopefully. Half of these turn out to have a bright crust of corrosion on the bead seat as well, which is the other half of the same story.
There is a short list of damage that cannot be repaired at any price, and it is worth knowing it. Anything in the sidewall or the shoulder. Kerbside on Bow Road or on your own drive, the visit is identical. Old tyres leave Stepney Green, Bow Common and E1 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Burdett Road, or at the kerb in Grove Road.
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Streets across E1 and E3 are parked nose to tail with a lot of tight shuffling in and out, and worn junctions along the A11 keep the suspension busy, so wheels here take a steady beating that never quite counts as an accident. Slow leaks are the result. We come to the parking space rather than asking anyone to give one up, and the tyre comes off the rim so the verdict rests on the bead rather than a guess.
The owner assumed a nail that kept resealing itself. There was no nail. The bead lip carried a clean cut roughly the length of a thumbnail, put there by a lever, and the matching bead seat on the alloy had lifted into a rough ridge. Cleaning the seat and fitting a fresh tyre closed it.
A car near Stepney Green had been through two tyres on one corner in eighteen months, both blamed on punctures. The rim was the culprit. Corrosion under the bead seat had built a raised line that would not let any new tyre seal, so it was cleaned back to bare metal before anything went on.
A valve had already been changed once and the leak carried on regardless. With the tyre off, the inner liner around the bead area showed the polished band you get when a lip has been sitting unevenly. Nothing about the valve was wrong. It had simply been the easiest thing to replace.
Not on the tyre side. The lip has a steel bundle inside it and the rubber over that bundle is what seals. Once it is cut or crushed there is nothing to build back. The rim is a different matter, since corrosion on the seat cleans up and takes the leak with it.
By how it behaves rather than by looking at it. A puncture loses air at a fairly steady rate whatever the weather. A bead leak often worsens in cold snaps and after the car has stood, and it keeps happening on the same wheel even after a repair.
Sometimes, around the rim edge, but not reliably. A leak that takes a week to show up as ten pounds is not going to bubble while you stand watching. Getting the tyre off and inspecting the lip and the seat is the only version of this that gives a straight answer.
Avoiding that is the whole discipline. Plenty of lubricant, the machine set for the rim size rather than forced, and the lever kept away from the lip. It costs a couple of extra minutes and it is the difference between a wheel that seals for years and one you keep feeding air.
It can be. Tight kerbs on the streets off Burdett Road clip the outer rim flange, and a flange bent even slightly stops the bead sitting flat on its seat. We check the flange with the tyre off, because a new tyre on a bent rim leaks in exactly the same way.
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