Pull a flint out of a tread groove and you can usually tell how long it has been living there. The sides are polished, the rubber has closed around it, and there is a dark ring where water has been working in. It arrived as a stone flicked up on an ordinary day, and every rotation since has walked it deeper.
That is how a fair number of blowouts are actually made. Nothing punctures on the day. The stone, or the glass chip, reaches the steel belt underneath the tread, water follows it down, and the steel rusts where no inspection will ever see it. Rusted belt edges lose their bond with the rubber around them, and a tyre with a belt separating inside it runs on a fault that grows every mile.
When that finally lets go it lets go all at once, at whatever speed you happen to be doing. A casing is under no obligation to warn you first. Which is the honest reason we look properly at what is stuck in a tread rather than flicking it out and saying nothing.
With children or an older passenger in the car, waiting is the problem, not the tyre. One call and a technician is on the way to the exact spot in TW9, with the replacement already loaded, and you know when he will be there rather than hoping. Steep camber in Kew? We move a few metres, North Sheen or anywhere else. Blocked drive in North Sheen? Open kerb in Petersham? Either works.
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Debris is not spread evenly across a road. It gathers in the gutter and the nearside lane of a fast route like the A316, and it gets ground down and scattered on the descent off Richmond Hill where everything brakes hard. Cars living around North Sheen, or out towards Mortlake, collect more than their share, and the pieces that matter are the small sharp ones.
Anything wedged tight in a groove has been forced there. A loose stone drops out on its own within a mile or two, so the ones still in place after weeks are the ones that have made room for themselves in the rubber underneath.
Belt coming away from rubber sometimes shows as a lump and sometimes as nothing more than a faint waviness across the tread, or a rumble at low speed that everybody blames on the road surface. Once found it is a replacement.
Fast dual carriageway keeps its rubbish in the nearside lane and the gutter, which is exactly where most cars spend their time. A driver near Lower Mortlake Road had two pieces of sharp aggregate bedded into one rear tyre. Neither had leaked.
Usually, and most get picked out and forgotten about. The ones that matter are sharp, wedged and deep enough to have reached the belt. That is a judgement made with the stone out and a light on the hole it leaves behind.
Sometimes a hum that changes with speed, sometimes nothing whatsoever. That is the awkward part. A belt separation is a fault inside the casing, and the outside of the tyre can look entirely presentable right up until it fails.
No. Repairs are for a clean hole through sound rubber in the middle of the tread. Corrosion in the steel is structural damage spreading sideways under the surface, and there is no patch made that does anything about it.
A minute a month is plenty. Do it when the tyre is warm and the grooves are open, and run a thumb along each one picking out anything hard. What you are hunting is the thing that has stopped moving.
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