A hole and a cut are not the same injury and they are not judged the same way. A nail makes a round penetration. It pushes the cords aside rather than severing them, and when the object comes out the surrounding structure is still continuous. That is what the repair rules were written around, and it is why most nails in the middle of the tread are good news.
A cut is a different event altogether. A kerb edge, a shard of glass or a strip of metal slices rather than punctures. It can sever cords outright, it is rarely round, and it often runs at an angle so the channel through the casing is far longer than the mark on the surface suggests. Nothing bonded to the inside of a tyre restores a cord that has been cut through, so a small cut in the crown can be beyond saving while a larger round hole beside it would have been fine.
Which of the two you have is not something anybody can tell from the pavement. It is settled with the tyre off the rim and a probe in the channel.
You are stood looking at a screw head in the tread and wondering whether to pull it out. We come to it, on the South Circular or on a driveway, take the wheel off and find out whether the damage is inside the repairable area. Whether it is Bedford Hill in rush hour or the South Circular at midnight, we answer. On Bedford Hill, day or night, Heaver Estate included, arrival across SW12 runs 30 to 60 minutes. A SW12 address in Hyde Farm and one in Nightingale Triangle are the same round.
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The cuts we are asked to judge around Balham come off kerbs and drain edges rather than anything dramatic. Squeezing into a gap on a permit street near the Nightingale Triangle, catching a kerb edge on the slope of Bedford Hill, running through the grit at the side of the South Circular. All of it slices rather than punctures.
A neat mark in the crown that turned out to be the entry point of a thin blade of metal lying at an angle under the tread. The channel was three times the length of the surface mark and had cut cords the whole way.
A tyre scuffed against a kerb edge on Bedford Hill with a short slit in the shoulder rubber. It was shallow enough to leave the cords untouched, so nothing needed doing beyond a proper look and a pressure check.
A car on the Heaver Estate had picked up a screw that entered the tread at a shallow angle and travelled underneath it. Sealing the entry point would have achieved nothing, because the damage sat two inches away from the visible hole.
The inside face answers it. A puncture leaves a small clean opening with the cords pushed apart around it. A cut leaves a slit with cord ends showing, or a channel a probe follows sideways rather than straight through.
Position is only the first test. An injury has to sit in the central band, be within the size limit and be free of cord damage. A cut usually fails on the last of those, and no repair replaces severed structure.
Often not. There is a layer of rubber over the cords whose job is to be sacrificed to kerbs, and a nick that stops within it is cosmetic. What condemns a sidewall is a cut deep enough to show cord, or any bulge.
There is no honest version of that. A repair to BS AU 159 is permanent or it is not a repair, and we hold no lesser grade back for awkward cases. Where a tyre cannot be saved, a replacement goes on from the van.
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