Leave a flint in a tread groove and it will not stay where it landed. Every time that part of the tyre comes round and takes the car's weight, the blocks squeeze together and press the stone a fraction deeper. On hilly ground those blocks are also being twisted by the torque going through them, climbing and braking all day, so the stone gets worked inward instead of flicked out. A few weeks of that and a chip you could have lifted out with a screwdriver has reached the steel belt.
Once it is through, water follows it in and the belt begins to rust from the inside, where nobody can see it. That shows up eventually as a soft lump or a ripple running round the tread, and by then the tyre is finished, because a rusted belt is not something anyone can patch. The useful news is that most trapped stones are precisely what they look like: a bit of granite sitting on the surface doing no harm. Telling those two apart is a two minute look with the wheel turned on full lock, and we would far rather do that now than sell you a tyre later.
A bulge in a sidewall is a tyre telling you the casing has already failed. What we can do is come to Sydenham, confirm what you are looking at, and fit the correct replacement on the spot, whether the car is on a driveway in Upper Sydenham or parked up in Crystal Palace. Old tyres leave Crystal Palace, Bell Green and SE26 with us, every time. You watch it happen in Forest Hill, or at the kerb in Sydenham.
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Steep streets collect grit. Rain washes it down the hill and it banks along the kerb line, exactly where cars park up and pull away again, so the tread picks it up at the moment it is under the most load. Drivers here find more stones bedded into their tyres than people living on the flat ever do, which makes a glance at the front tyres on the way to the car a habit worth having.
Spotted while a tyre was being fitted on the other side of the car. It had gone deep enough to feel with a pick but not through the rubber, so it came out and the tyre stayed on.
A tyre giving up a few pounds a week with no nail anywhere in it. The culprit was a chip of granite pushed clean through a groove, small enough that it sealed itself most of the time and only leaked when the car was moving.
Brown staining at the bottom of a tread groove is not dirt. It is the belt underneath telling you it has been wet for some time, and it means the tyre is beyond saving however much tread is left on it.
Out of the grooves, yes, with something blunt. What you should not do is prise at anything that has worked into the rubber itself, because a small injury turns into a large one very easily. If it does not lift out readily, leave it alone.
If the stone has reached the belt then yes, and soon, because the damage carries on regardless of whether the tyre holds pressure. If it is sitting in the groove, no. Knowing which of the two you have is the entire point of the visit.
One point six millimetres across the central three quarters, right the way round the tyre. That is the depth at which you are breaking the law, not the depth at which grip disappears, and on wet climbs the gap between those two is worth thinking about.
If it sits in the repairable part of the tread and the belt beneath it is still clean, yes. If the steel has started to corrode, no, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling a repair that will come back. You get shown what was found.
Then that is what you are told, and it happens often. Nobody has ever thanked us for condemning a healthy tyre. You get a straight verdict on all four and the car keeps the rubber it already had on it.
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