The tin of sealant in the boot buys you a journey and can cost you the tyre. What comes out of it is a latex emulsion, fired in through the valve and then flung outward by the turning wheel until it finds the hole and sets across it. That claim is true as far as it goes. What the tin does not mention is where the rest of it ends up: right round the inside of the casing, over the whole liner, into the well of the rim and all over the pressure sensor if the car carries one.
That coating is the problem. A permanent repair is a patch bonded to the inner liner, and bonding wants clean, dry, prepared rubber underneath it. Cured sealant does not simply wipe off. It has to be scraped and washed out of the entire inner surface before anybody can even see the damage, and where it has soaked into the liner it may not come out at all, which leaves a patch with nothing dependable to grip. Used once so you can get off a main road, it is a fair trade. Used as a way of putting a repair off for a fortnight, it usually turns a repairable tyre into a replacement.
The can of sealant in the boot is a way of moving the car, not a repair. Ring us instead and the wheel comes off where the car is, on a driveway in Clerkenwell Green or at the kerb, the tyre comes off the rim, and the damage is inspected from the inside. The wheel comes off in Exmouth Market, not on a ramp in Angel. Nothing is towed out of St John Street or Farringdon Road; the work finishes there. The EC1R postcode and a street in the Amwell Street area: that is enough.
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The lanes around Amwell Street and the streets off Exmouth Market are narrow, parked solid and no place to be standing beside a jacked up car, which is exactly why so many drivers here reach for the tin in the first place. That instinct is not wrong. What matters is what happens next, because the clock on whether the tyre can still be repaired starts the moment the stuff goes in. A sealed tyre wants dealing with the same day rather than the following month, and we come to the car, so there is no reason to leave it.
The puncture itself sat in the middle of the tread and would have been a straightforward repair on the day it happened. A fortnight of sealant coating the inside meant nothing would bond to it, and the tyre was replaced instead.
Used once and dealt with promptly, it can still go the right way. The casing was washed and scraped back to clean rubber, the damage was inspected properly, and the patch went on as normal.
The car had a sensor in each wheel and the latex had set hard around the one in the punctured tyre. Cleaning those is fiddly and not always successful, which is a cost nobody counts at the moment the tin goes in.
If it gets you off a main road or out of somewhere you should not be standing, use it. That is what it is for. What it is not is a repair, and the longer it stays in there the more likely it is to cost you the tyre rather than save it.
Because a patch has to bond to bare inner liner, and sealant coats every inch of it. Cured latex must be scraped and washed out before anybody can even find the damage, and where it has soaked into the rubber it does not always come out. A patch over that has nothing to hold.
Often, yes, if it has not been in there long. The tyre comes off the rim and the whole inner surface is scraped and washed back to clean rubber, which takes time and does work. What defeats it is weeks of driving with the stuff cured hard into the liner.
It can. Sealant sets in the well of the wheel and around the pressure sensor if the car has one, and both want cleaning properly rather than leaving. We do that while the tyre is off, and we say honestly if a sensor has taken more than it is going to survive.
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