Got a request from the firm who powder coated the wheels for feedback.
So I did an honest review. Wheels are OK, but the refitting of the tyres poor. 3 out of the 4 were leaking at the rim due to the tyres not being cleaned before refitting. And the wheel nuts done up so tight it needed standing on a 3ft breaker bar to slacken them (the correct setting is
88Nm.)
Got a funny reply from them. Their 'records' say the wheels were correctly torqued. Have asked then since it's in their records what that torque setting was. They also implied that the car should have been returned to them to remove a wheel.
You mention badly fitting tyres. Can you have "badly fitting wheels" in the sense that whatever tyre is fitted (as the tyres are changed when the tread wears down) the tyre has a slow puncture?
Ever since we've have our car one wheel has had a very slow puncture which triggers the pressure warning about a month after the tyre is pumped to the correct pressure. Various garages have checked for punctures and can find nothing. Given that it continues even after a change of tyre, it seems to be something about that wheel. Could the rim be slightly out of true or corroded such that the bead of the tyre doesn't make a perfect seal? But in such a way that a normal check for bubbles when the wheel is held under water doesn't show anything. Is it possible for a wheel to have a "puncture" in the sense that air leaks through the metal of the wheel between one rim and the other due to an imperfect weld?
We've got used to checking and pumping up that tyre every few weeks, since garages always report "no fault found".
Tyre changes these days doen't necessarily mean that the valve is changed. The valve stem has the tyre pressure monitor and many (most/all) tyre places now will leave the existing valve in place when replacing the tyre.
Certainly. A long time ago I bought a brand new Astra (about 1990 I think). About 1996, it had a tyre deflate overnight. Didn't notice until I drive on it. New tyre.
It did it again a few days later. And a second one went.
These were alloy wheels, and the clear varnish on them was flaking away, affecting the seal. I ended up having all the wheels stripped and re- coated, and eventually all new tyres.
TPM plus alloy wheels, and they all are now, equals leak around the valve base. Three of my four (no spare any more) leak around the valves. At least one has been replaced, though I'm not sure which one.
There is an occasional 'sensors not found' warning, which may be due to the car being seven years old, and that being the average battery life for the sensors.
I can't think of a single time in nearly fifty years of driving that this pressure monitoring would have been any use to me, but I certainly need it now because my car is fitted with it...
Never had any bother with them even at 7 years old.
It is faintly useful when you have a blow out on a runflat at motorway speeds since it lights up a "sudden loss of pressure" warning and suggests that you pull over and take a look. Then 50 miles at <50mph.
Apart from that the steering is surprisingly little affected. The big bang is a bit of a giveaway though when you get a 6" nail through the side wall. No amount of foot pumping would restore pressure to it.
I have lost count of the number of people I have seen driving along down the high street with one or more flat tyres on their car.
Go back and insist they do the job properly, I would.
They use a windy gun always set to maximum, it seems to be the industry standard. I always take a torque wrench along with me to such jobs and insist they leave the bolts just snug, I then tighten with my torque wrench on the correct setting.
Mine has given me early warning several times, usually of very slow leaks that have just passed it's threshold to warn about, but once it triggered on a motorway with a red rather than yellow warning, I happened to be just approaching a service area, so I pulled straight off, into the car park, and by the time I was parked up the tyre was totally flat, so I'd say that was worthwhile.
It's surprising how many people try to loosen (and maybe tighten) the bolts using their *hands* on the wheelbrace. I was taught (with a starting-handle type wheelbrace) to stand sideways on, hold the remote end of the shaft with one hand, raise my opposite leg and place my foot on the cranked part of the wheelbrace and press down while pulling up with my hand (to counteract the tendency for my leg to pull the wheelbrace off the head of the bolt). Using your leg, you can apply much greater force than using your arm, if the bolts happen to have been tightened too much.
OK, an L-shaped wheelbrace with an extending end allows even your arm to exert enough torque if the lever is several feet long when extended.
The other trick (and it's amazing how many people forget this) is to do the initial loosening by half a turn or so with the flat tyre still in contact with the ground so the wheel doesn't just spin round unless the brakes are applied. I first realised this when I had applied the handbrake but the rear wheel (up in the air) still spun round when I tried to loosen the bolts with my leg. I didn't have a passenger with me to apply the footbrake. Likewise, do the final tightening with the new wheel in contact with the ground.
Also, I always put the car in first gear. It will brake the front wheel so you can loosen the bolts while the wheel is in the air, and it will hold the car from falling off the jack when changing a rear wheel and the handbrake can only act on the other wheel.
I think (at least my local version of ) F1 Autocentre are pretty good with tyres for a not-quite nationwide company. I was having four tyres fitted, my rims were found to be a bit corroded they wire-wheeled them and painted goop on them which took the chap a good hour longer, no extra charge, and they have held since. Also I do notice them using a torque wrench to tighten the bolts.
They do try to up-sell to a super/computer/laser alignment check, but it's not a hard sell.
Yes, I can imagine scenarios in which TPM would be useful, it's just that none of them have ever happened to me in that length of time.
I did have a tyre go suddenly flat on me, and I mean within a few seconds. I never found out why. I didn't need TPM then, because when I moved off from stationary, spinning off the road and stopping just short of a lamp-post did the trick.
Providing the pressure monitoring doesn't give false alarms and "cry wolf" then it is invaluable.
If you have a slow puncture, you may not be aware of it unless you check your tyre pressures frequently. Shortly after I'd passed my test, I was driving on an unlit country lane in my mum's Renault (soft French suspension) and the car seemed to roll a bit more than normal. Then I smelt hot rubber. Yes, the tyre was very soft and the walls were rubbing. Changing the tyre was not easy without a torch. I took the rear seat out and rested it on the headlight to reflect a *little* bit of light back to where I was working, but mostly I had to work by feel.
Pressure warning would have alerted me before the tyre had got so flat that the car started to feel lopsided or to roll or the "magic smoke" from the tyre alerted me. The tyres had all looked fine when I set off, so unless I'd measured the pressure, I'd never have known.
I've been lucky. The one time when a tyre went catastrophically flat was when a car pulled onto the wrong side of the road to pass parked cars on his side, and I had to swerve onto the kerb to avoid him. The bugger didn't even stop. That ripped a big hole in the side wall, though I didn't realise that immediately: having set off from rest, the car felt OK until I tried to turn into a side road. That was the only time I had to call out he RAC for a simple flat tyre, because on the Peugeot 306 the spare was held in a wire cage below the boot. This was secured with a large bolt through the floor of the boot. You'd think that this bolt would have a hexagonal head the same size as the wheel bolts so the wheelbrace could undo it. But no, they'd machined a semi-cylindrical notch in the circular head, and you were supposed to use a flattened and of the wheelbrace as a crude screwdriver. That's fine unless the thread of the bolt has corroded to the nut on the cage. The "screwdriver" just climbed out of the notch when I tried to exert any serious force. It took the RAC man about half an hour, spraying the nut liberally with WD40 and applying a blowtorch, before he could get it free. Because the bolt was in a slighly recessed part of the boot floor, there wasn't even room for him to angle-grind a couple of flats on the round head so a Mole grip could get a purchase on it. Changing the wheel after that was trivial. I made sure I loosened the nut every month or so and applied a bit of grease, to prevent the problem happening again.
No. All you needed to do was spray a soapy mixture to the wheel rim to see the leaks. Caused by crud (paint and corrosion) from the 'old' wheels adhering to the tyre rim. The main reason I got the wheels redone. Only an idiot wouldn't clean the tyre before fitting to a 'new' wheel. And the same idiot tightened up the nuts to well over double the correct torque.
Good luck to them with that. If you enter the car reg on a tyre place data thingie, it finds the make and model correctly, but doesn't know the tyre specs. You have to enter those manually.
That is the main reason I had the wheels overhauled. They didn't look that bad, but corrosion on the rims was causing the tyres to lose pressure. Although now being powder coated, they do look very smart indeed.
I've watched a fitter use a torque wrench. Didn't see him consult a chart first, though. And when it clicked he gave it a lot more thrust - to make sure.
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