The first properly cold morning of the autumn fills our phone. Cars that were fine all week light up the pressure warning coming down from the village, and the drivers all ask the same question, which is whether they have a puncture. Some do. Many are watching physics. Air contracts as it cools, so a tyre set correctly on a mild evening can read a pound or two lower at dawn after a frost with absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Telling the two apart is straightforward once you know what to compare. A temperature reading is even. All four tyres are down by a similar amount, the warning clears as the car warms on a run, and the pressures come back by the afternoon. A leak is uneven. One corner sits lower than the other three, it carries on dropping after the car has been driven, and topping it up buys a few days rather than fixing anything. If one wheel is doing something the other three are not, that is a puncture and it will not talk itself out of being one.
The car being off the road is the problem; the puncture is just the reason. So the job is finished on site in The Hale or wherever the car is standing rather than started there. Tight in Arrandene, easy in The Ridgeway: neither stops the job. Level in The Hale, sloping in Arrandene: we set the car straight first.
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Mornings around Mill Hill start cold and often start uphill, which is exactly the combination that makes a soft tyre look like a serious fault and a serious fault look like the weather. The lanes above the Broadway give you nowhere sensible to pull in and check. We come to the driveway or the roadside spot, read all four rather than the one that triggered the light, and only take a tyre off when there is genuinely something in it.
A car set off from a driveway near the Ridgeway on a frosty start with the light on and all four tyres low by a similar margin. Nothing was leaking anywhere. The pressures had been set on a warm day, and once they were brought to the figures the car's maker lists, the light stayed off.
Three tyres within a pound of each other and the nearside rear more than ten pounds down is not weather. It was a roofing nail sitting central and clean in the tread, picked up somewhere without the driver ever feeling it. Repaired at the house rather than driven anywhere on it.
Somebody had been putting air in every couple of days and treating it as a cold snap. A leak that needs feeding on a schedule is a leak. By the time we reached it the tyre had spent a week running soft, and the inner liner had begun to scuff, which is how a repairable puncture becomes a replacement.
Probably not, if it cleared as the car warmed and all four were low together. Check them cold in the morning against the manufacturer's figures. If one sits consistently behind the others two days running, that one has something in it.
Gently and briefly, to somewhere you can stop properly. Running underinflated flexes the sidewall far beyond what it was designed for and builds heat in the shoulder, which is what turns a cheap repair into a ruined casing. Get off the fast roads first.
No. The figures on the door plate are cold pressures already, so setting them cold makes them correct. Adding extra lifts the middle of the tread out of proper contact with the road, which is the last thing you want on a wet descent.
That is a large share of the job up here. We bring our own lighting and we choose where to set up, so the work happens on a level, visible surface rather than on a camber in the dark. If your spot is a poor one, you will hear so before getting out.
It is done where the car stands. The equipment travels with the fitter, so the tyre comes off the rim, gets inspected and repaired, and goes back balanced without the wheel ever leaving your sight.
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