The reason a tyre driven flat cannot usually be repaired has very little to do with the hole. Inside every tyre is a thin airtight skin called the inner liner, and a patch has to bond to it. Run a tyre with no air in it and the sidewalls fold in on themselves, rubbing that liner against itself on every rotation. It abrades. After a mile the inside of the tyre is scuffed, wrinkled and full of fine black dust, and there is no clean sound surface left for anything to stick to.
Which is why the answer is sometimes no even when the puncture itself is a textbook one, dead centre of the tread and no wider than the nail that made it. We take the tyre off the wheel and look inside before saying anything, because the outside tells you nothing about this. If the liner is sound, the tyre gets repaired to BS AU 159 and goes back onto the wheel with years left in it. If it is chewed, we will show you the dust and explain why nothing is going onto it, and we would far rather have that conversation than sell you a repair that lets go in a fortnight.
The usual routine is to pump it up, hope, and drive somewhere to be told whether it can be saved. We come to the car in Notting Hill, take the wheel off where it stands and inspect the tyre inside and out before anybody commits to anything. We are out on Ladbroke Grove at 2am and in Kensington Park Road at 2pm. The Lansdowne phone and the Ladbroke Grove phone ring the same fitter, any hour.
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On a market day the streets around Portobello Road are the worst possible place for a tyre to go down, because there is nowhere obvious to stop and a queue behind you that makes stopping feel unreasonable. That pressure is what costs people their tyres here, rather than the nail. Pull in at the first space you can reach even if it is an awkward one, because we come to the car and it does not need to be anywhere convenient. The tyre you save is usually the one you were about to pay to replace.
A driver felt the tyre go near Portobello Road and pressed on rather than stop in the middle of the market traffic, which is entirely understandable. It was a small nail in the middle of the tread and it would have been a simple repair a few hundred yards earlier.
When the tyre came off the rim, the inside was grey and powdery all the way around the lower half. That dust is the liner itself, and it is the clearest sign there is that a tyre has been run without air in it.
Another car pulled into the first permit bay it reached when the warning came up rather than driving on to somewhere more convenient. The liner was untouched, the injury was inside the repairable band, and the same tyre went back onto the wheel.
Not necessarily, and distance matters far more than time. A few yards to get out of a live lane does no harm whatsoever. It is the run of half a mile or more, with the sidewalls folding over on every turn of the wheel, that takes the liner apart.
By the inside of it. The liner comes up scuffed and wrinkled, there is fine rubber dust loose in the casing, and the beads often show marking where the rim has been working on them. None of that is visible until the tyre is off the wheel.
The hole was never the problem here. A plug pushed in from outside is not a repair we would make in any case, and the reason this tyre is being refused is the state of the surface a patch would have to bond to. A small hole in a ruined liner is still a ruined liner.
Get clear of the traffic and stop as soon as you have somewhere safe, then leave it alone. Nothing you do afterwards affects the outcome as much as how far the wheel turns while it is empty. Call, and the car stays exactly where it is until we get there.
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