If the tire would blow up from normal inflation, then it would also blow up from normal driving. And that’s also likely to have dire consequences. So if you’re not afraid to drive, then don’t be afraid to inflate.
In 1980 I was inflating a tire on my first car at a gas station. It was damaged and had been leaking air and needed to be replaced, but I kept adding air and trying to eke a little more life out of it on the cheap. So one day it just exploded in my face. Loudest thing I’ve ever heard. I was not injured, fortunately, but my ears rang for the rest of the day.
It’s amazing how many dumb dangerous things we did when young and lived to tell about it.
Sometimes the spare is a nuisance to access for a casual pressure check. A better solution IMHO is to carry a portable compressor in the trunk, the kind powered by the car’s 12v outlet. This also serves multiple other purposes besides inflating a flat spare: the occasional top-up without having to drive to a gas station and find coins to stick into the machine, or inflating a tire with a slow leak so you can at least drive to a repair shop instead of having to put on a spare. I’ve found it to be very useful on multiple occasions. It’s just a cheap one that I’ve had for decades but contrary to what I keep hearing, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to top up an underinflated tire.
Same here, it’s made by “Slime” (they also make a tire-patching goo, hence the name) and it works great. It turns off automatically when it reaches the right pressure. I can inflate all my tires in minutes with it, takes very little effort. I keep it in my car trunk.
Just looked it up and I bought this thing 8 years ago, still runs like a champ.
As has been mentioned, the likelihood of this happening is near zero. You have about the same chance of winning the powerbal. There are a few reasons for this:
Household/diy equipment will take a very very very very long time (if they even have the power to do it) to overinflate your tire to the point at which the tire will fail. You would have to leave it on for such a stupidly long time…like 20-30 minutes. Tremendously improbable.
Modern tires are incredibly resilient. Think about hitting a bump with your car. While your suspension is built to help absorb some of that impact, your tire also deals with it. A pothole can cause a jump in pressure up to 5x or more of what the recommended pressure is. And tires don’t typically explode (though they do occasionally fail and go flat) after hitting a pothole.
Explosion is extremely unlikely at passenger tire pressures. Those split rim semi truck tires are inflated way higher than normal car tires. Even if a car has a weak spot, and even if you over inflated it enough to cause it to fail at the weak spot, you’d hear a small to medium “pop” and then you’d hear the air hissing out.
In short, it’s safe for you to do, and good for you to be comfortable with (kind of like jump starting a car… When you need to do that, your husband or a tow truck driver may be a long way away), but totally justifiable to tell your husband that falls under one of his regular household duties and not yours, lol.
You could have just de-pressured the tire.
Another vote for truck tires being the danger you have to watch out for. Not only are they inflated to much higher pressures but they’re more likely to be mounted on the split rims mentioned upthread. If for any reason the rim halves and the tire aren’t seated properly they can give way catastrophically once pressure is applied. NEVER inflate a truck tire outside of a cage.
Not only is inflating a tire less safe than driving the car it is attached to, you have it backwards.
Many of those cheap little home tankless compressors can (slowly) inflate to well over 100psi. And because they are slower than a wet week, there is a real chance you will hook it up and walk away, allowing it to gradually over-inflate the tyre. I just checked a couple on line and they claimed to go to 150 or even 250psi (which is probably exaggerated, but anyway).
Meanwhile, professional equipment would be a compressor connected to a tank that has a cut off of about 100psi maximum which is lower than the maximum pressure of one of those dinky little compressors. And 100psi won’t burst a car tire.
Is it O.K. to add a few PSI with the tire still on the truck?
A lot of gas station air hoses can’t even get proper pressure in a bike tire (most of which are higher pressure than car tires). My hybrid (in between mountain and road) bike takes up to 60, and road bikes can go over 100. Some gas stations top out at around 40.
Sorry I inverted this, which is somewhat ironic in the circumstances.
“Not only is inflating a tire more less safe than driving the car it is attached to, you have it backwards”
Our Dart did not come with a spare tire; just some stupid “tire service kit” consisting of an air compressor and a can of sealant, in a big Styrofoam spacer to fill up the space that would have contained a spare tire I guess an actual spare tire was an extra-cost option, that the original owner chose not to pay for.
STUPID!!!
On several occasions, that left me stranded out in the middle of nowhere, having to wait hours for a tow truck to get me to a tire shop, and hope we could get there while they were still open.
Now, it has a full-sized spare, which it should have had in the first place.
Now, I’ll admit that if being towed to a tire place, and getting the tire fixed or replaced there is a good option, then I would rather do that than swap in the spare; but my experiences with the Dart have clearly demonstrated to me the importance of having the option to swap in a spare, if I have to, when help is too far away.
I’ve seen this company’s tire inflation system demonstrated at a few off-road events. I’d very much like to get it for our Jeep, when I think we can spare that much $$$. It’d probably be a slight bit of overkill to get such a system for the Dart, as well.
On the other hand, it would go a long way toward easing @Seanette’s fears, I think. You set it to the desired pressure, and it accurately and in a clearly reliable manner, stops when it gets to that pressure. No fear at all of overinflating, and she could stand a safe distance away, while it is doing its thing, if she still doesn’t trust the tires not to explode.
And I’ve learned of yet another nifty feature on my Jeep. (It keeps calling my attention, from time to time, to features that I didn’t know it had.) When a tire is low, and you are pumping air into it, it honks the horn brielfy, just before the tire reaches proper pressure.
I recently bought a hand-held compressor with digital display (I think it was at Costco): set the pressure, it will inflate to that pressure and stop. I can set it to any pressure (I assume up to 100) so 33 for car, or 60 for bicycles, works great. When you first screw on the hose, it will tell you current pressure. Recharge via USB-C. (I assume I could rig up recharge from the car too) It also doubles as a charger for a phone, if you have a USB-to-phone cable.
Far simpler, more convenient and portable than my clunky 30-year-old compressor I keep in the garage. I assume this is the future, smart compressors.
Googling “car tire burst pressure”, I see some sources claiming it would take 200-250 psi to make a healthy tire come apart. A typical 5-gallon, oil-free, single stage compressor from Home Depot might be capable of 125psi. I have a 60-gallon, two-stage, oil-lubed compressor that cost me about $2000, and it can only put about 180 psi in the tank.
Car tires just don’t fill that fast, even from a 125-psi tank. It’s a tiny passage through that tire valve and valve stem, and the tire has a lot of volume; you need to hold the air chuck on there for a few seconds to gain just a single PSI. Typical practice is:
- check tire pressure with gauge
- add a few seconds of air for each PSI that’s missing
- check pressure; bleed/add air as required until you’re within a psi of the label inside the driver door jamb
To overfill by 10 psi would require absentmindedly holding the air chuck on the valve stem for 30 seconds or more - and that would still only put the tire at 20% of its burst pressure.
Tiny compressors powered from your car’s cigarette lighter socket fill even more slowly. Try running one for 30 seconds, and you might get a couple of psi.
TL,DR: you’re not gonna explode a car tire with a consumer grade air compressor, and not from a cigarette-lighter-powered inflator, even if it’s one rated for 100-psi motor coach tires.
It’s been years since I had to inflate a bicycle tire. However, the station I use has free air and I don’t think it has a regulator. I have a hand truck that has small, wide pressurized wheels (with tubes, I assume), and at that station I do have to use short bursts to top off the tires.