A repair is not a bung in a hole. When a nail goes through a tyre it cuts the casing cords it passes between, and those cords were carrying load. The patch bonded to the inner liner takes over that work, which is why its size is not a matter of what happens to be in the box. It has to be large enough to overlap undamaged cord by a proper margin all the way round the injury, so the load has somewhere to transfer into. A small patch over a large hole is a leak that has not happened yet.
That gives the whole job its limit. As the injury gets bigger, the patch needed gets bigger faster, and fairly quickly the patch required would have to spread out into the shoulder where the tyre flexes hardest and where nothing may be bonded. When that point is reached the tyre is finished, and no amount of goodwill changes it. The recognised standard, BS AU 159, sets out both the maximum injury size and the area of the tyre that may be repaired, and a repair done to it is a permanent one rather than a get you home. The channel gets filled as well as the liner patched, so water cannot reach the steel cords the nail exposed.
Run-flats change the timing, not the rules. We come out in SW1V, get the wheel off and inspect the casing properly, because a run-flat that has been driven on soft can look perfect from the outside and be scrap inside. Level in St George's Square, sloping in Churchill Gardens: we set the car straight first. Underground parking in the Dolphin Square area or Lupus Street is worth flagging. A SW1V address in Belgrave Road and one in Warwick Square are the same round.
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Slow punctures picked up around the garden squares tend to be discovered while the car is parked rather than while it is moving, which is genuinely good news. The tyre has not been run flat, so the injury is still whatever the nail made it and nothing has been added by driving. Size is the whole question here, and size cannot be judged through the tread with the tyre still on the wheel. Leave the car in its bay and let the tyre come off there, because the answer takes a couple of minutes once anybody can actually see the hole.
What appeared to be a small nail head turned out to be a coach screw, and the injury it had cut through the casing was well past what any patch could bridge with sound cord to spare.
A tyre repaired elsewhere had a small patch centred on a considerably larger hole. It had held for a while, which is the misleading part, and it was already lifting at one edge.
A straightforward nail in the crown of a tyre near St George's Square, with the channel plugged from the inside before the patch went on so nothing could work its way down to the cords.
The recognised standard sets a maximum injury size for a passenger car tyre, and it is smaller than most people assume. The reason is not caution for its own sake. It is that the patch has to overlap sound cord all round, and beyond a certain diameter the patch needed no longer fits inside the repairable area.
Because a plug fills the channel and does nothing about the cords the nail cut or the liner it went through. The load carrying job is what the patch does. A plug on its own is an external seal on a tyre whose structure is still damaged, which is why it is not an accepted repair.
The British standard covering tyre repair: where in the tyre a repair may be made, how large an injury may be, how the area is prepared and what a compliant repair consists of. It is the difference between a repair with a defined life and somebody's opinion applied with glue.
No. A repair made to the standard restores the casing in that area and the tyre carries on to its original speed and load rating. The tyre wears out when the tread runs out, exactly as it would have done. The repair is marked so anybody taking it off later knows it is there.
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