?Tire flat inflation and seal products do work however they are for emergency use only,? Akers told me. ?We find they can caus e irreparable damage to the rim of the tire you?re repairing.? ?
Really ?
How would they damage the rim?
Indirectly, when:
1) the stuff is out-of-date. 2) the gas has leaked. 3) you don't put it on the tyre valve properly and it sprays everywhere. 4) you find there's another hole and the type doesn't inflate properly. etc...In each case you get so annoyed you kick the wheel, so damaging the rim.
So those inflation/seal products are as much use as a chocolate teapot: you get a repairable puncture but in the absence of a spare, in order to continue driving you have to use the product and therefore render the tyre unrepairable. Sounds like a nice little earner for the tyre manufacturers. There's no substitute for a proper full-size spare that is fully interchangeable with the running wheels and can be used as far and as fast as the real tyres until you can take the punctured tyre to be repaired.
+1 And yet lots of cars are sold without spare wheels. It isn't even an option on some. "But punctures are very, Sir" Oh no, they're bl**dy not!
Yep, plus locking wheel bolts, put on with an impact wrench, tight, so that when you try to get them off by the side of the road you damage the pattern, so they won't undo.
I was told the reason they got rid of the spare wheel was partially due to being able to quote better fuel efficiency.
Could be true. My main car has been one such for six years now. I had one slow puncture which I reflated to get to a tyre shop where it was plugged, one on holiday where I used the goo and then had to replace the tyre. So maybe I have been lucky (not particularly high mileage). Can't see how you would damage the rim, except perhaps that you don't have to drive a deflated low profile tyre so far before you are on the rim.
My last but two car had no spare, it came with the bottle of goop and a compressor, the latter was handy enough for slow punctures, but when I had a blowout on the motorway, there was nothing the goop could have done ... wait ages for flatbed recovery (included service from manufacturer) get taken to only nearby tyre place that has required size in stock, pay through nose, waste half of day.
Both cars since that one have space-savers which are "ok" I'll never buy a car with no spare again.
Well it's incontestable that removing 15-20 Kg of weight that has to be lugged around for every mile of a cars life cannot do anything but reduce fuel consumption.
It would interesting to speculate on how much it saves the motorist over the life of the car. I could easily see it straying into hundreds if not thousands of pounds.
Against that you need to weigh the chances of having a puncture together with the inconvenience of not having a spare. Which while the end of the world for that person at that time doesn't really happen often enough to justify the permanent carrying of a spare.
last time I fitted a spare wheel, it went flat 400 yards later (****ing cowboy tyre fitters) and I was still stuck. That was 1988.
I find it interesting that although the manufactures will give you a bottle of goop but no spare tyre (ordinary or space-saver), they seem to have a space in the boot for the spare tyre, and will often have one available for you to buy as an optional extra!
Pass. But they are often very different to the solution provided by the likes of Contiseal tyres:
or the Punctureseal ...
... I've used it on all sorts of vehicles (the last being a mobility scooter), even post puncture repairs and never had any further issues (20 years use).
But I guess it's like all things, you have to get the right stuff, know how to use it, understand how it works and where the real world risks are.
Bottom line ... I would rather not have to suffer a puncture in the first place (even with TPS) and especially not want any of my family trying to change a wheel or even waiting on the side of a busy motorway at night for the recovery services, if it wasn't unavoidable.
Cheers, T i m
Because that extra weight nixes the fuel consumption/emissions.
some people are just fanny's and can't do practical things .....
or emergency use only,? Akers told me. ?We find they can ca use irreparable damage to the rim of the tire you?re repairing.? ??
The gunge covers the entire rim inside the tyre and can't be removed withou t a lot of work. It prevents the new tyre from seating, hence it leaks between tyre and rim. Also leaks round the valve.
There was once a further gunge product to repair leaks of this sort due to corrosion on the rim but its now been banned. Dunno why.
Does the weight of a spare tyre *really* affect consumption much? Does anyone have any actual figures? The extra weight is only going to affect cosumption significantly when accelerating, the steady speed mpg will be very little affected.
I'd have thought it's simply the extra cost (and thus increase in selling price) that pushes manufacturers towards 'no spare'.
They could test it without the spare and quote those figures. And take the door mirrors off.
Much? No. Enough to make a measurable difference, probably.
I would like to think the manufacturers would.
And hill climbing, more energy being used on the way up than recovered on the way down?
I can't imaging the manufacturing cost of a wheel and tyre would be much on even a £6K car but more like a combination of variables that justify leaving it out.
1) The weight so fuel consumption so emissions. 2) The ability of a typical driver these days to be able to change one. 3) The likelihood of someone bothering to change one, even if they could and had one (and it being useable), and so relying on the recovery services providing one or dealing with the puncture.The irony of all of this is 'the chances are' you wouldn't need to stop and change a wheel, if your tyres were pre treated with Puncturseal (I mention that specifically because it's good and I know and trust it).
It doesn't 'cover the rim' and isn't corrosive, is water soluble so can simply be washed out if required, doesn't interfere with TPS and is there ready to work, reducing the damage that might be done by leaving the object stuck in the tyre for a long time or if the tyre ran partially deflated for any time (and it doesn't take much 'time' to do that at 70 mph).
Plus all the advantages of applying it to caravans and trailers, where you don't generally have TPS (although you can) and the chances are the tyre (at best) has been wrecked before you even notice something is wrong or end up on you side on the motorway.
As mentioned, as soon as we got the mobility scooter on approval for my Mum, the first thing I did was apply Punctureseal to all 4 tyres because I'd rather bear that cost if we don't take the scooter than even have one puncture whilst out and ~3 miles away from home (or a road) with her.
Cheers, T i m
To do that on most cars today would require carrying *two* full spares since they now have a spin handedness. I can live with having a thin spare or more expensive a runflat that limits range to 50 miles and speed to 50mph. The latter being more than a bit scary on a motorway.
Most punctures that I have had were anyway not repairable being serious gashes to tyres resulting from hitting sharp metal at motorway speeds. I think I have had roughly one per decade since I started driving.
I was very impressed with my runflats in this situation apart from a bang and dashboard light coming on to say loss of tyre pressure there was no loss of control at all and it was straight forward to pull up on the hard shoulder to examine the damage. Trying to pump it up was a lost cause. Off the motorway ASAP limped home 10 miles at a time on a runflat. I was a little bit worried by how hot it got even at 40mph.
I'd imagine the relationship would be fairly linear? So wheel/tyre @
25kg - 2% of the average car's weight? At 10000 miles a year, 200 'free' miles, say £30/year.For myself I'd rather see weight lost elsewhere. I could start by eating fewer pies :-)
No, at any reasonable speed air resistance dominates. I think this drag is a square law with speed. So the loss from extra weight due to: inertia and added rolling resistance is very dependent on the type of driving you do.
We had the same debate about bicycles a couple of weeks ago.
In my car, it would take up most of the boot space. And it has different sizes back and front.
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