There is a size limit on a repairable puncture and it is smaller than most people expect. For an ordinary car tyre the damage has to measure no more than six millimetres across once it has been cleaned out and probed. Six millimetres is roughly the width of a pencil. A roofing screw usually comes in well under it. A bolt, a spike off the back of a loaded lorry, or anything that has been working back and forth in the tread for a few hundred miles very often does not.
That measurement is taken after the object comes out, not before, and it catches people. A neat little entry on the outside can open into something considerably larger once the tyre is off the rim and the damage is probed through the casing, because the object has been moving with every revolution and reaming the hole as it goes. Which is the real argument against driving on a puncture you already know about. The same nail found on Tuesday is usually a repair. Found the following month, it is a tyre.
Roadworks, building sites and anywhere heavy traffic turns are where punctures come from. Round here that tends to mean The Broadway and the parking either side of it. Anywhere in UB1, at the kerb, on a drive or in a car park. The The Broadway phone and the the Western Road area phone ring the same fitter, any hour. Midnight in Norwood Green, midday in Dormers Wells, the same call either way.
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The Broadway and the Uxbridge Road are delivery routes from early in the morning, and what falls off the back of that traffic is why this part of west London picks up so many tread punctures. Most of them are repairable on the day they happen. The ones that are not are usually the ones somebody has been topping up with air since last month. A tyre asking for air more than about once a month is telling you something a pump does not answer.
A tyre that picked something up along The Broadway had a screw sitting in the middle of the tread. Cleaned out it measured well inside the limit, so it was patched properly, rebalanced and back on the car.
A driver in Norwood Green had been running on a known nail for weeks. The entry looked tidy enough. The hole through the casing had been worked open past anything a patch is allowed to cover.
Something sharp picked up near the A312 had gone through the tread and torn rather than punched. Torn damage does not measure like a clean hole and it does not get repaired.
Six millimetres across the damage on a normal passenger car tyre, measured after the hole has been cleaned and probed rather than judged by eye from outside. Anything larger sits outside what BS AU 159 permits.
Because the object flexes with the tread every time the wheel turns, and it works the hole open like a slow reamer. A screw that would have measured two millimetres on the day it went in can be past the limit a few weeks later.
It makes it worth dealing with promptly. It is not an emergency in the way a blowout is, but every mile you cover on it makes a repair less likely to be allowed, which turns a small job into a new tyre for no good reason.
Yes. The tyre comes off the wheel and goes back on at the roadside, which is what makes a proper patch possible away from a garage. We do it on side streets and driveways across UB1 and UB2 daily.
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