What is the most common reason a brand new tyre is soft a month after it went on? Not the tyre, and not a nail. It is the ledge inside the wheel that the tyre seals against, left dirty by whoever did the fitting.
That ledge is the bead seat, and on a wheel fifteen years old it carries old sealing compound, corrosion, baked on brake dust and the shadow of the tyre before this one. A new bead pressed onto that has to seal against an uneven surface, and mostly it manages, for a while. Then a cold night stiffens the rubber and it stops managing. The owner goes hunting for a puncture in a tyre that has never been punctured.
It takes about two minutes a wheel to do properly. With the old tyre off, the seat is taken back to clean metal with a wire cup, inner ledge and outer, checked for pitting deep enough to matter, then sealed before the new tyre is mounted. If a car is still on its original alloys, this is the part of the job worth asking about.
It comes down to two things. You pick premium, mid-range or budget on the phone; we bring it to the car in SW16 at an hour you agreed to and fit it where it stands. A Norbury cul-de-sac or a Thornton Heath main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in Thornton Heath or a narrow bay on Crown Lane is usually workable. The SW16 postcode and a street in Green Lane: that is enough.
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Cars along these streets stand out in the weather all year and get gritted road water thrown at the wheels every winter, so the alloys here are usually in worse condition than the mileage suggests. That makes bead cleaning matter more than it would on a car kept under cover. When a set goes on out towards Pollards Hill, the wheels get the same attention as the tyres.
A car on Norbury Avenue was having all four done for the first time in a long while. Every seat had a crust of corrosion under the old bead. Cleaned back, sealed and fitted, and none of them wanted topping up afterwards.
A set fitted elsewhere had one wheel going down slowly from new. The tyre itself was perfect. The seat had never been touched and the bead was sitting on a ridge of old compound. Broken down, cleaned, refitted, and the leak went.
One rim had pitting deep enough to leave a channel running across the seat, which no amount of cleaning closes up. The owner heard that before the new tyre went anywhere near it, which is more use than finding out in December.
It should be standard and often is not, because it takes time and nobody ever sees it. Ask anyway. Anyone who cleans beads properly will be glad to be asked, and a fitter who has never given it a thought has told you something useful.
The rim lip gets checked for flat spots and cracks, the inner face gets a look for damage you cannot see with a tyre on it, and old stick on balance weights come away with their glue. That is the only moment all of it is visible.
Same principle, different failure. Steel rusts rather than blooming into white oxide, and the rust flakes off the seat in scales that hold the bead up off the ledge. It cleans back the same way, and a kerbed painted rim rusts outward from the chip.
Yes. The machine, the balancer, the compressor and the lighting all travel on the van, and outdoors it is the same job with the same steps in the same order. What we need is room alongside the car to work safely.
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