Suspicious punctures.

Stephen_Leak

It is amazing what can puncture a tyre.

I was once at at tyre depot getting some new tyres, and they showed me a complete (albeit well mangled) car roof aerial inside a punctured tyre they'd just taken off the wheel.

And I know from personal experience that a steel braced radial tyre is no match for a blackthorn thorn.

Mark_Hewitt

A few years ago I noticed both my rear tyres were getting lower, kept pumping them up. Eventually I took them to get looked at and found there was an identical nail in both of them, couldn't have been anything else but deliberate.

missile

It may be deliberate but unless you have upset someone I would guess you have been unfortunate.

Screws picked up on the road do end up penetrating as you describe. I have picked up more than my fair share over the years. It would be incredibly difficult to screw into a tyre like you have suggested.

Austineer_2

I work in an independent, family-run tyre depot and can easily see eight or nine punctures a day.

The majority of the time they're caused by screws - the nature of the thread means that the screw works its way in easily, but I have seen punctures caused by everything from the head of a pair of tree-loppers to half a pair of scissors. My favourite obscure one was a 12-inch screwdriver blade which had completely entered the tyre and was rattling around inside with only a tiny hole on the outside to show for it. And years ago my colleague (who has been fitting tyres for 45 years, man and boy) found a tube-type puncture which had been caused by a 10-bob note which was left inside the tyre when it was fitted up!

The rule about not repairing too close to the wall is correct. The curved inside edge means that we can't get a proper seal with the plug/patch combo. A good measure is the width of a man's thumb - any closer than that to the edge and the tyre isn't normally safe to repair.

As a previous poster has said, it is incredibly hard to screw a screw into the tread of an inflated tyre. If I wanted to do damage, I'd dart the sidewall (and I see enough of these, too - never done one though, I hasten to add!) - much quicker and more discreet.

The majority of the time, screw-based punctures are fixable. We do have to look at the condition of the tyre; money-wise it's not worth fixing a tyre that's on the legal limit for instance, or one that has aged and is cracking. We can't repair a puncture if there's another puncture in the same quarter of the tyre or if the tyre has suffered secondary damage, wherein the sidewall degrades when the tyre is being run in an underinflated condition.

***TOP TIP*** For those of you that are worried about repeated punctures, investigate some of the brands that come with a lifetime guarantee which allows you free puncture repairs (in most cases you just pay for the valve and balance) or an allowance back on the tyre if it's not repairable. We do one mid-range brand that offers this and most months we see two or three people who need to take advantage of the offer. There's no catch to the customer; we claim our costs back from the tyre brand's wholesaler, who use the guarantee as an incentive to sell more of a good tyre that you may normally discount as you hadn't heard of the brand before.

I hope this information might be of use to some of you.

I loves tyres, I do

anotherbaldrick

I had a slow puncture once , you could see a mark on the tread where something had gone in. Took it to a tyre specialist and when he removed the tyre it was a bloody great screwdriver and the handle was inside the tyre . Now how the hell is that possible

Wig

Mark_Hewitt wrote: »

A few years ago I noticed both my rear tyres were getting lower, kept pumping them up. Eventually I took them to get looked at and found there was an identical nail in both of them, couldn't have been anything else but deliberate.

So it was absolutly impossible that you happened to drive through an area where a box of (Obviously identical) nails had been spilled?