Some slow leaks are not in the tyre at all. Cast aluminium is not perfectly dense metal; the casting process leaves microscopic voids, and on a small number of wheels those voids join up into a path from the inside of the rim to the outside air. Straight out of the factory the paint and lacquer seal that path over. What breaks the seal is time and salt. Once the coating is chipped at a kerb, corrosion creeps underneath it, lifts it, and opens the way through. The result is a wheel that weeps air steadily through its own face while the tyre on it is perfectly sound.
The symptoms are distinctive if you know to look for them. The tyre goes down over a fortnight rather than a day, there is nothing in the tread, the valve tests dry, and the loss is roughly the same every time regardless of use. The test is the tyre off the rim and the bare wheel in water, or soaped all over. A puncture bubbles at a point. A porous wheel bubbles from the face of the casting or all along the line where the tyre sat, and no repair to a tyre would ever have touched it. That is worth finding out before you pay somebody to patch something that has no hole in it.
Screws and nails collect where traffic slows and stops, which in SW1 usually means Buckingham Palace Road and the parking around Grosvenor Gardens. Pick one up and the only real question is whether it can be repaired. Steep camber in Westminster? We move a few metres, Grosvenor Gardens or anywhere else. Blocked drive in Buckingham Palace Road? Open kerb in the Ebury Street area? Either works. The SW1 postcode and a street in the Ebury Street area: that is enough.
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Kerbing is relentless around here, because every manoeuvre happens in a tight bay, a hotel forecourt or an underground ramp with a wall on one side. A scuffed rim looks purely cosmetic and usually is, but the scuff is where the protective coating has gone, and a winter of salt working behind it is how a wheel starts to weep. If a tyre in SW1 has been asking for air every couple of weeks with nothing at all to find in the tread, suspect the wheel before you suspect the tyre.
A car in a bay near Grosvenor Gardens had been losing air for a month. The tyre came off, went into water, and stayed silent. The wheel bubbled from the casting behind the spoke.
A rim scuffed on an underground ramp the previous winter had corroded underneath the damaged lacquer, and the leak followed the line of the scuff around the wheel.
A driver had already paid for a tyre repair elsewhere and then a new valve. Both were sound. The air had been coming through the wheel the whole time.
Yes, on cast alloys. The casting contains tiny voids and occasionally they line up into a route through the rim. The coating normally seals them, so the leak only appears years later once corrosion has got under a chip or a scuff and opened the path back up.
By the pattern and then by test. A puncture usually loses air faster and bubbles from one point. Porosity loses air slowly and evenly and bubbles from the face of the casting or along the whole seat line. We take the tyre off and check the bare wheel rather than guessing from the outside.
Often. The affected area is stripped back to clean metal and sealed from the inside, which is a proper fix rather than a bodge. Where corrosion has eaten into the seat area badly enough to leave it pitted and uneven, the wheel is finished and no sealer will save it.
No, which is the reason this is worth diagnosing first. Patching an undamaged tyre does nothing except cost you a visit, and the leak carries on exactly as before. It is one of the more common reasons people end up paying twice for the same symptom.
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