Six millimetres. That is the largest injury a car tyre may carry and still be repaired, and it is one of the few figures in this trade that is genuinely fixed rather than a matter of opinion.
The catch is what gets measured. It is not the width of the nail you pulled out and it is not the little dimple you can see in the tread. The injury has to be opened out and cleaned back to sound material first, because a screw that has been turning in the tread for a fortnight has ground its hole oval, and a stone that went in at an angle has torn a channel rather than made a hole. Only once it is reamed square can anyone honestly say whether what is left is inside the limit or outside it.
So a small object does not guarantee a small injury, and that is the part people find hardest to accept. We would rather show you the reamer and the hole it has produced than argue about it. The alternative is a patch spanning a gap too wide to support.
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 Bec Common or at the kerb, the tyre comes off the rim, and the damage is inspected from the inside. School run in Amen Corner or 1am in Furzedown, we answer the same. Christmas Day in Furzedown, any day in Bec Common: the line is open. A SW17 address in Furzedown and one in Bec Common are the same round.
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Small sharp debris is what Tooting produces. Dropped screws in the loading bays around the Broadway, fragments of metal in the gutter along Mitcham Road, the usual glass at the kerb. Most of it makes a hole comfortably inside the limit if dealt with while the tyre is still up. Left grinding for a fortnight, the same screw makes an injury nobody can legally repair.
The head was tiny and the mark in the tread was barely visible. Opened out, the channel was ragged and well over the limit, because the nail had been working back and forth for days. The tyre was replaced and the owner saw why.
Caught early on a car parked off Garratt Lane, still holding most of its pressure. Reamed out, the injury was a clean round three millimetres in the middle of the tread. Plugged and patched from the inside, balanced, and the tyre carried on.
A tyre had picked up a screw and a shard of metal within an inch of one another. Each was inside the size limit on its own, but repairs sitting that close leave a weak strip of casing between them, so it was not worth saving.
It is part of the British Standard the trade repairs to, BS AU 159, which sets both where on the tyre a repair may go and how large the injury may be. For a car tyre the ceiling is six millimetres once the hole has been cleaned out.
Because the damage is what the object did over time, not its own diameter. Turning under load, a thin screw enlarges its own hole and frays the cords around it. By the time it is opened out, the injury can be double what you expected.
No. A patch works by bonding to sound rubber around an injury the casing can still support. Beyond six millimetres the cords have lost too much continuity for that, and a larger patch merely covers a hole rather than reinforcing it.
Gladly, if you want to watch. The tyre comes off the rim anyway so the inside can be read, and the reamer and the gauge are both in your view. A decision you have seen being made is easier to accept than one delivered over the phone.
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