Need your advice on a good inside automotive tire patch

Ralph Mowery wrote, on Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:21:16 -0500:

This is the same deal (almost) that Costco gives. Costco, if you bought from them, will repair for free.

Problem with Costco is the huge wait. Dunno about Tire Discount's wait.

Reply to
Danny D.
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Tony Hwang wrote, on Mon, 07 Dec 2015 13:36:21 -0700:

Of course I do. I balance them *statically*. If you want, I'll snap a picture of my mounting and balance tools.

I use the stickon weights from HF. I bought quarter ounce zinc weights (California has a thing about lead). But I found 1/2 ounce is fine so next time I'll buy 1/2 ounce instead.

There is no vibration. At any speed. Yes I fully know EVERYONE swears you must dynamically balance. I know that.

But, guess what? My wheels don't vibrate. At any speed.

So what does that tell you?

Reply to
Danny D.

clare wrote, on Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:37:51 -0500:

I keep the T-shaped handle thing in my car for emergencies. What I really need, for emergencies, is air. I keep buying that liquid-air stuff, and it keeps going bad.

What I really need is simply a tire-valve-hose.

That way, I can suck some air out of the other four tires to fill the one tire that is temporarily patched from the outside in a super emergency.

Problem is, there are never any emergencies. The spare works just fine when I get a flat.

So, why repair on the road from the outside?

Reply to
Danny D.

When I got the tires (they had to order them) I set up a time to be there and was taken right away. For the rotations so far there may have been one person ahead of me. Guess that it could be the time of day as to how busy they are. Being retired I usually go during the week around 10:00.

The do have a big window with some stools where you can look at them doing the work. They use some impact wrenches on the nuts, but do a final tightning with a torque wrench.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

When I worked for Sears around 1970 all we had was the bubble balancer. I was told to slide the weights around the wheel in pairs, put one on the bottom and then put the other on the top for the final balance. Don't know if this did anything,but was the standard for them.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

I did see a man put the patch on his tire and use one of the battery powered pumps to pump up the tire. Not sure if he had a spare or not. It was on something like a station wagon and to get to the spare he would have had a long time removing all the stuff he had in the back over the tire.

A girl was over at our house visiting my son. She had a flat and I changed it for her. Her trunk was filled with stuff. It took her about 20 minuits to get it all out. Yard looked we were having a yard sell.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

I'll continue to use my 12 volt compressor from Harbor Freight.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

Some tires give you a choice. Some don't I have installed sets of tires that didn't even need ANY balancing to run at extra-legal speeds with no shake - but they are extremely rare.

I've likely installed as many sets of tires as anyone here on this list - some years installing over 1800 sets . Most years of my 25 "active" years well over 400 sets.

I've used bubble balancers, on-car spin ballancers, and computerized dynamic ballancers from at least 4 manufacturers.

A large percentage of tires have a significant dynamic inballance. Some cars are not fussy about dynamic balance - others are very fussy.

Reply to
clare

The hole in the cords of the tire are the size of what goes through - and the "plug" needs to fill the hole right to the cords - so no - the hole sdoes not "close in" requiring or allowing a smaller plug. It closes down to LOOK like a smaller hole.

Reply to
clare

Everybody who thinks they are somebody needs to own one bimmer, I Merc, one Porsche, 1 Audi, and 1 Caddilac for good measure.

"If you have to ask how much, you can't afford it"

Reply to
clare

If your tires don't shake at any speed balancing only to the closest half ounce you are not very sensitive to shake or you don't drive very fast is all I can say.

Reply to
clare

When the spare is in the bottom of the trunk, and the trunk is full and it's too nasty to put everything in the trunk on the side of the road to get the spare out. Or when the spare is flat too.

A 12 volt compressor or a good manual tire pump is a lot better than canned air

Reply to
clare

CY: I had mixed results with HF. Most of the tools have worked fine.

CY: And the Aamco that finished rebuilding my TX. Problem was, it would not stay in park. I'd stop, put the shift in park, take my foot off the brake, and the vehicle rolls away. I took it back, and they gave me a story about how badly stretched was the linkage. I took it home, and find the two rods connect with a loop and bolt. Loosen the bolt, shift the loop about 3/8 inch, and the problem is solved. The Aamco shop could not do that? Nonsense.

CY: I wonder.

CY: Oh, sorry the hell for not commenting sooner the hell.

CY: Myself and many others have endured the Midas three level pricing.

1) phone. Oh, it sounds like $75 2) quote at the counter, double the phone quote. Gonna be $150. 3) Out the door price. Double the counter price. We had to replace some other parts, and the total came to $300.

CY: I can do toe sets, using either a long board and magic marker. Or if I have second worker, a tape measure.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

CY: I had a five spark plug tuneup, one time. They were honest enough to tell me about it. "in pretty tight". Some time later, I went after the spark plug which wasn't too hard to change, after the wheel was off and push the mud flap up. A couple weeks ago, I did an eight plug tune up on my van. That did wonders. Ought to done that years ago. The guy across the street from me kept telling me how miserable a job it was, and I'd best let him do it. He kept being sick or unavailable, and finally I just started the job my self.

CY: I'd have to agree with that. Real shame the honest ones retire.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

Makes you wonder if the tune up before that was also a 7 plug tune up? Could have been a rather ancient spark plug.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon

I bought the extended warranty for the reason I gave that AWD Subaru requires all 4 tires be equal. The dealer also gave free lifetime rotation.

I'm going to trade it in a a couple of months and break free of the service/dealer as every time I take it in for an oil change and free rotation he looks for all kinds of things to do.

Reply to
Frank

On some tires it helped - on others it made it worse. Dynamic balancing balances the tire not only around the circumference bur from bead to bead - across the tread - and it does this inner to outer ballance at every point around the circumference of the tire. A tire can be statically ballanced and "wobble" like crazy, even though it does not "tramp".. It is more important on wheels with a large offset, either positive or negative, because the moving impalance is farther from the point where the contact patch and the steering axis meet.

Reply to
clare

Frank wrote, on Mon, 07 Dec 2015 19:41:28 -0500:

What does 'equal' mean?

All tires should be "equal" with respect to size, brand, & tread pattern. It's just plain ghetto to have different tires on the same axle even. You shouldn't even have appreciably different wear on them.

So, I don't know what you've been drinking that makes Subaru any different than any other vehicle.

Those Subaru Marketing teams have you snowed I think.

Reply to
Danny D.

clare wrote, on Mon, 07 Dec 2015 18:24:03 -0500:

I only have experience with a sum total of five (5) tires. And, so far, they've balanced just fine with my HF static balancer. As I said, I have BBS wheels (standard BMW issue) so maybe that plays a role. Also, the 5 tires were all bought at the same time from Tire Rack. Dunno if that has an effect at all (probably not). I removed all the weights first. I then balanced them (none needed more than a short strip of weights). Pretty much that was it.

Car never vibrated. If it did, I'd take it to the shop. But it didn't.

Reply to
Danny D.

Stormin Mormon wrote, on Mon, 07 Dec 2015 18:54:17 -0500:

I made a toe measurement tool out of pipe.

One long pipe to go parallel to the axle and two side pipes that are perpendicular and which slide along the pipe and clamp in place.

Then I just measure the distance from the center of the tread to the center of the tread.

Some alignment numbers are defined from the center of the vehicle, which means I have a bit of slop since mine only measures total toe and not center-out toe.

Toe is as easy as twisting the tie rod ends equally on both sides in opposite directions.

The hardest part is making a toe plate that spins freely while the car's weight is sitting on each wheel.

Camber isn't too hard because you can make a faceplate for the wheels bolted onto the lug bolt holes (Bimmers have lug bolts, not lug nuts). The faceplate pushes out further than the tire so that you can measure the camber angle to a tenth of a degree with a level.

Caster is a bit too difficult, but, in the case of the bimmer, only front toe and rear toe & camber are adjustable anyway.

One problem is that you have to set a bimmer to something called "normal ride height" which is anything but normal. It's a height that happens only when you add over 500 pounds of weight, evenly distributed throughout the front & back seats and the trunk (in addition to 18 gallons of gas).

Most bimmer alignments are done wrong, that is, without first setting ride height, so the camber is off by a few degrees (and it's supposed to be negative 2 degrees in the rear, which is a hellova lot).

The problem here is similar to the changing tire problem. Most people don't *know* how to do the job, so, the mechanics almost always skimp (I mean, how many even *have* 500 pounds of weight lying around?).

They know better. They just know their customer doesn't know any better. So, they cheat.

The customer loses.

Reply to
Danny D.

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