There is a leak that only happens while the car is moving, and it fools nearly everybody who meets it. A snap-in valve is rubber moulded around a brass tube, stretched through a hole in the wheel, and it spends its whole life half in the weather and half inside the rim. Rubber that old goes hard. The crease at its base, where it is permanently bent and stretched over the edge of the hole, is where it cracks first, and a crack there can sit closed while the car is standing still. Get up to speed and the valve is flung outward, the crack opens, and air leaves through it.
So the tyre reads correctly at the end of a journey, is soft the following morning, and every inspection of the tread comes back with nothing, because there is nothing in the tread to find. The check takes a second. Bend the valve over to one side with a finger and look along the outside of the bend. Dull, hard rubber with fine crazing across it has done its time. What follows is not a puncture repair, because there is no puncture to repair. The tyre comes off the wheel, the old valve is pulled out, a new one is drawn in and the wheel goes back on.
You are stood looking at a screw head in the tread and wondering whether to pull it out. We come to it, on India Way or on a driveway, take the wheel off and find out whether the damage is inside the repairable area. Valve in Westway corridor, balance in Hammersmith Park, pressures before we go. The wheel comes off in Wood Lane, not on a ramp in Shepherd's Bush.
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Cars around the White City Estate and the streets off Wood Lane tend to do short local journeys and sit for days in between, which is the pattern that hides this fault best. The tyre is soft when you come out to it, hard by the time you have driven anywhere, and nobody ever sees it going down. If a tyre keeps needing air and two people have already looked at the tread, get a fingertip on the valve and bend it. It is the cheapest test on the car and it settles the question in about a second.
A car used for short trips around Hammersmith Park was losing air over each weekend and holding it during the week. Nothing had gone into the tread at all. The valve had cracked at the base and was only opening under load.
A driver rang asking for a puncture repair. The tread was sound the whole way round, and bending the valve over showed a split running across the crease. The tyre had never been punctured.
Once one valve had gone, the other three were checked while the tools were out. All four had been fitted with the current set of tyres and all four had gone hard.
Yes, and it is a common way for one to fail. The valve is thrown outward as the wheel turns, which opens a crack that closes again the moment the car stops. That gives you a tyre that empties on the road and appears perfectly stable on a driveway, which is what makes it so hard to pin down.
Roughly as long as the tyre it was fitted with. It sits in sunlight, brake heat and winter salt, and it flexes on every rotation, so it ages on a similar clock to the rubber around it. That is why it is renewed as a matter of course whenever a tyre is changed.
It does. The valve has a flange on the inside of the rim that holds it in place under pressure, so it can only be pulled through from the inside once the tyre is off the wheel. It is a short job, but it needs the tyre broken down first, which is why it is not a roadside pump-and-go fix.
We look at the valve before anything else, because it takes a moment and it decides the whole job. If the air is going out through the valve there is nothing to patch, and patching a sound tyre would have achieved precisely nothing. If the tread has genuinely been punctured, we assess it properly against the repair standard.
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