A nail in the middle of the tread is a nuisance. A nail in the shoulder is a countdown. The difference is movement. The centre of the tread is backed by the stiff belt package and barely deforms, so an object embedded there sits still and does very little except let air out slowly. The shoulder is where the tread rolls into and out of the contact patch, and it flexes hard on every single revolution. Anything stuck in it is being levered back and forth thousands of times a mile.
That lever action does not leave a round hole. It elongates it into a slot, works the object sideways through the rubber, and steadily reduces the sound material left holding pressure at that spot. From outside almost nothing changes. The head still looks like a head, the tyre still holds air, and the driver reasonably concludes there is time. Then, usually warm and at speed, the weakened section opens up all at once. The other half of the news is that it was never repairable in the first place, because the shoulder sits outside the area any patch is permitted to serve. Which means a nail there is not a job to schedule for a convenient week.
If it went on Albert Embankment, you already know how little room there is to deal with it. We are out around Lansdowne Green and South Lambeth through the night and on bank holidays. A the Wandsworth Road area cul-de-sac or a South Lambeth main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in South Lambeth or a narrow bay on Wandsworth Road is usually workable. A SW8 address in Albert Embankment and one in Lansdowne Green are the same round.
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Construction traffic around Nine Elms puts screws, roofing nails and offcuts onto roads that were already busy, and the approaches to Vauxhall Cross collect the lot of it in the gutters where you sit in queues. Most of what you pick up lands in the middle of the tread and is a straightforward job on any day of the week. The ones worth acting on quickly are the ones near the edge. If you can see a nail head in the outer part of the tread, that is the week to deal with it rather than the month.
A screw that had been noticed a month earlier and left alone had migrated a good distance sideways. What went in as a small round injury had become an elongated tear by the time the tyre came off.
A driver had been checking the tyre weekly and it had never dropped. It opened up on a warm afternoon at speed, which is what a shoulder injury tends to do rather than deflating gradually.
A tyre picked up a roofing nail near Nine Elms and took it in at an angle into the outer tread. Caught the same week, so it came off the car in a bay rather than on the move.
Not if it is near the edge of the tread. A shoulder injury enlarges itself every time the wheel turns, so holding pressure today tells you very little about next week. In the middle of the tread you have more time, though it is still a repair rather than a feature.
Because the damage has been growing internally while the outside looked unchanged. The rubber and the cords are being worked apart by flexing, and pressure is being held by a shrinking amount of sound material until there is not enough of it left. There is no gradual stage at the end.
If the tyre is up and the nail is in the middle of the tread, a short careful drive is usually fine. If it is in the shoulder, we would rather come to you. It is a fast road system around Vauxhall Cross and it is not a place to find out how much material was left.
Less than where it went in. A nail, a screw and a piece of wire in the same part of the shoulder all end the same way, because the failure is caused by the flexing rather than by the object. A screw does travel sideways faster, since the thread gives the rubber something to walk along.
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