[Tech1] Just another day.

[Alan Taylor]

If your car has room for a space-saver spare tyre, I would strongly recommend that you get one.  

The tyre repair kit supplied with newer cars only works under certain circumstances. The puncture must be no bigger than 4mm, the puncture must be in the main tread and there must be no damage to the sidewall or wheel rim.  Roadside assistance services would need to source a replacement tyre if gunge can’t be used. At night, bank holidays or weekends, that might involve an extremely lengthy delay, possibly overnight or even more than one night.

Around here, a lot of people are getting tyres wrecked by pot holes, which typically split the sidewall and/or dent the wheel rim. The gunge kit is likely to be useless for those repairs. 

One of Janet’s colleagues discovered a punctured tyre in the hospital car park.  Janet phoned me to ask how to help her use the gunge kit. I advised not to use it and took a jack and wheel brace over . We removed the wheel and took it to the tyre fitter who pulled out a screw, plugged the hole and only charged £15.  If she had used the gunge, it would have meant replacing the tyre ( £220 ) plus an additional charge for cleaning up the gunge. 

Another time I stopped to help somebody in the lane through our village who had hit a pot hole, split the tyre and used gunge to try and fix it.  It kept oozing out and he only managed to drive a few hundred metres before having to pull over again. The tyre was a write-off three times over. Once because of the split, secondly by driving on it while flat and again because of the gunge.

The tyre kits do have one advantage.  The electrically operated air compressor can be used to inflate your tyres free of charge, instead of having to pay to use the air compressor at a petrol station, so you have no excuse for not having them at the correct pressure.

Alan


> On 16 Apr 2024, at 23:08, B Wilkinson via Tech1 <tech1 at tech-ops.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> … my Kia Niro EV has no spare and the tyres are not run flat. Just a complicated looking aerosol can and an electric pump. It’s a good job I don’t go far now, just in case!
>