A string plug is not a repair. It is a length of tacky cord pushed in from the outside with the tyre still on the wheel, and it exists so that somebody stuck a long way from help can get home. Nobody has seen inside the tyre. Nobody knows what the nail did to the casing on its way through. And it will hold air, often for a year or more, which is precisely the problem, because it gives every appearance of having been dealt with.
What turns up later is a plug weeping around its edges and water tracking along the steel belt from the hole. Wet steel rusts, rust breaks the bond between belt and rubber, and that spreads outwards from the puncture as a soft patch you can feel with a thumb once the tyre is off the rim. By then there is nothing left to repair a second time. So when somebody rings about a tyre that was fixed once already and is going down again, the job starts by breaking it off the wheel and looking. Occasionally the plug is recent and the liner is clean and it can be put right properly.
Run your hand round the inside of the sidewall, slowly, with the car on the ground. What there is, is a replacement brought to you: correct size, fitted and balanced where the car stands in St Albans, with the alloy and the sensor checked while the wheel is off. Every street in London Colney, every close in Fleetville, every junction on the M1. On the A1081, day or night, Jersey Farm included, arrival across Hertfordshire runs 30 to 60 minutes. We are out on the A414 at 2am and in Marshalswick at 2pm.
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The mileage pattern here is what makes an old plug worth taking seriously. A tyre can potter around Jersey Farm for weeks with a weep nobody notices, then spend forty minutes at seventy on the M1 between junctions 6 and 7, hot and flexing hard. That is where a rusted belt gives up, not in town. If a repaired tyre is losing air again, get it looked at before the next long run.
Still holding, just about, and losing a few psi a week. Off the wheel, the liner around it was stained brown where water had been sitting, and the belt underneath had gone. Replacement, no argument.
A soft patch the size of a coin that moved under a thumb. That is the casing coming apart internally, and no amount of looking at the outside of the tyre would ever have found it.
A driver had been told all four needed replacing. Three of them had years left in them and the fourth had a repairable nail sitting in the middle of the tread. She kept her money and got one repair.
Look across the tread for a small round rubber tail sitting slightly proud, often trimmed flush and hard to spot once it is dirty. If the car came to you second hand, assume it is possible and mention it when you ring.
Fair question. We would rather do a repair and be rung again next year than lose a customer over one sale. Plenty of calls end with us saying the tyre is fine. When one is condemned, you get shown the reason on the tyre itself.
Never. A bulge means the cords inside have snapped and only the rubber is holding the shape, usually after a kerb strike or a pothole. It will not get better and it fails without warning. That one is a replacement every time.
It can. Fine surface crazing on an otherwise sound tyre is age showing and is often nothing to worry about. Cracks deep enough to catch a fingernail mean the rubber has hardened and lost its flex, and on a tyre several years old that is the end of it.
There is no timetable, which is the honest answer. It can sit there for months and then let go on a fast road, when the tyre is hot and working hardest. That is why one going down again after a repair gets looked at rather than topped up.
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