Yesterday I replaced my damaged rear tire replaced at the Toyota dealership. They also repaired a nail hole I didn’t even know about in a front tire. Ten miles later, I got a blowout in the repaired tire.
The only other time I’ve had a professional flat repair was at a tire shop 13 years ago. That one lasted nearly 100 miles before it blew out.
How common is it for a tire to blow out immediately after it is professionally repaired? Is this process unsafe? From my anecdotal experience of two flat repairs, two different types of shops in two different parts of the country in two different decades on two different types of vehicles screwed up. So either that’s a remarkable coincidence or professional flat repair should be illegal.
I don’t know about professional repair but I have never gotten it to work worth a damn on anything myself and I have tried it many times on vehicles and equipment.
I’m gonna say you’ve had a remarkable coincidence. Either they slowly leaked down until the tire failed in service due to underinflation, or there was some other damage that wasn’t detected. The former is more likely.
I’ve repaired three flats on my car and one on my motorcycle with “sticky rope” style tire plugs, no problems at all. Car tires went 25K miles after repair. Several friends have repaired motorcycle tires the same way, no issues. With the right kind of flat (a simple/clean puncture wound away from the sidewall) and a good repair (rubber cement and sticky rope), there shouldn’t be an issue. Always need to leak-check after refilling the tire though (and check pressure after a few miles, and perhaps even again the next day). Since both of your tire failures were very soon after repair, maybe your repair shop skipped this last item both times…
I’ve had tire repairs last thousands of miles, including 600 mile trips made in a single day. Where I used to live, screws and nails would end up in my tires way too often(like 3 times in a year, as I recall). One of the roads I traveled was in between town and the city dump, so maybe that had something to do with it.
I don’t know much about tires, or auto repair in general, but I was happy to not need to buy a new tire. I’ve since replaced all the tires due to wear, but as I said, the repairs worked surprisingly well. The repairs consisted of removing the screw/nail, using a round file in the hole to ‘rough it up’, and then a rubber plug with some sort of glue compound on it was pushed thru the hole.
Maybe I was lucky, or you were unlucky.
Edited to add: The repairs were done by ppl who repair a lot of tires, so maybe their technique was better than mine would have been.
I have had flats repaired at least three times in the past decade or so and not had a problem. These were on tires that saw thousands of miles of service after being patched. If the tire was totally flat or you drove on it for long just mostly flat, it could have done damage that made it prone to fail later.
When I delivered pizzas, picking up nails, screws, locust thorns, etc. was a monthly occurrence. I plugged tires scores of times and never had any problems with any of them. Sometimes, the simple fact is that the person plugging it may just not be doing it well. I’ve seen some horror stories at tire shops involving poorly/untrained/high personnel.
This spring I had new tires put on my cars’ rims by a tire shop - a major national name-brand chain. My car was still on snow tires/rims, so I only gave them my summer rims; I’ve seen and heard enough so that I will not let anyone but me install wheels on my car and properly torque the lug nuts.
Anyway, the tire-changing technician actually used a DIE GRINDER to clean my painted rims before installing the new weights. All the way down to the white primer. Gave me my rims/tires with nary a word, like nothing was wrong; I didn’t notice it until the following day, when I was installing those rims/tires onto my car. Egads. Shop ended up paying for two repainted rims for me.
All of this to say that a minimum-wage kid at a tire shop who can pull off a stunt like that probably shouldn’t be trusted to install tire plugs, either.
Well, IIRC my tire went completely flat 13 years ago while the car was sitting in a parking lot. And as I stated in the OP, yesterday I didn’t even know that tire had a nail in it. So in both cases it is likely that I unknowingly drove hundreds or even thousands of miles with a slightly underinflated tire.
But if that’s the root cause of the failure, then wouldn’t that be a fairly typical case? Should a flat repair be performed only if they know that the damage is recent? If old leak -> invisible tire damage -> blowout immediately after repair, then it seems flat repair is unsafe in the majority of cases.
If you run on a tire that is semi inflated for more than a short time it will screw up the tire so it cannot be used again. In that case the fix should not be done. A good repair guy should check for that damage before they bother to do the fix. I had a repair guy show me the damage once so I had to buy a new tire instead of getting a fix.
I’m going to guess that they used an inside patch. Most places nowadays (at least in my are) have rules about what tires they can plug and what must be repaired with an inside patch. Basically, few tirew qualify for the plug. If the blowout occured at the site of the repair, that’s pretty weird, unless the tire had already been damaged as the result of it’s having been underinflated.
I’m going to guess that at some conference or seminar on tires, a bunch of people heard a presentation about how plugs are dangerous, and inside patches are more reliable. Maybe so, but I’ve been plugging my own tires for years, and I’ve never had any problems. I wouldn’t begin to be able to apply an inside patch.
Nope, the blowouts aren’t at the site of the repair.
I remember the tire 13 years ago was plugged. The entire side wall blew out, but I’m pretty sure the plug was not in the side wall. It occurred 75 miles away from the shop that did the repair, so I took it to the nearest Goodyear. Their mechanic said the plug had come out, somehow causing the side wall to blow. I drove with the donut all the way to my usual shop where they said that’s absurd, plugs don’t come out, even if they did it wouldn’t affect the side wall, grumble grumble here’s your free (used) tire.
Yesterday I don’t know whether it was a patch or a plug, but there was certainly not a nail in the sidewall. Then last night I took the kids out to dinner and heard the tire deflating when I got out of the car. There was a huge bulge in the side wall and the air was rushing out between the tire and the rim. This morning the Toyota mechanics were completely baffled (no grumbling) and installed a free (new) tire.
Whether it’s due to the plug itself or due to driving an unknowable distance on a soft tire, it seems to me that a repaired tire is likely to blow out the side wall even if the repair is not on the side wall.
If your sidewalls blew out, it’s definitely a coincidence and you probably were driving on underinflated tires. I believe tire repair shops can legally only repair punctures in the tread. Due to liability issues, they cannot repair sidewalls. At least anytime I needed a repair, they declined to repair any tires with bad sidewalls. They must junk the tire and it is up to you to buy a new one. FWIW, in 35 years of driving, I have never had a plug fail in a tire. I have been able to drive on repaired flats until it has worn enough I could afford a new tire. Or until the tread wore out enough I needed a new one.
They should be using both a plug and an inside patch. Not one or the other. “Cheap” places (and I’ve used them before I knew better) will only plug. More expensive places will do both, and it takes longer.
I’ve repaired at least three flats (can’t really remember) over the years on motorcycles, but not with the “sticky rope” plugs. I use the mushroom-shaped plugs, inserted head-first through the hole with a device that compresses the plug so it can pass through the hole, and, when withdrawn, allows the mushroom head to expand inside the tire. No glue. Here’s a link: http://www.stopngo.com/motorcycle.asp#tireplugger
I’ve never had a problem with a tire repaired in this way, and I’ve ridden substantial distances (like 1,000 miles or more) on a plugged tire.
As the tire shop explained to me, the plug fills the hole in the tread, and the inside patch prevents air from leaking out around the plug and infiltrating the inner structure of the tire. Skip the patch, and air can find its way out either where the tread joins to the sidewall, or it can go on a little further and bubble out the sidewall.
However it works out, I’ve had the same tire shop patch several tires over the years, and I’ve never had a slightest hint of trouble. But these guys take the time to find and mark the damage, dismount the tire, glue in a tread plug, grind a clean spot inside the tire and glue on an inner patch, then mount and re-balance the tire.
I have had plugs for years with no trouble at all. They are particularly good for nails and screws. Big holes, I would not repair. The donut spare tire is a joke.
A good plug job is self-vulcanizing. Like some glued wood, the repaired spot is often more reliable than the rest of the rubber.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a self-vulcanizing plug fail when properly installed, and it doesn’t take much to properly install one.
If the tire wasn’t abused (including driven too long under low pressure) and there is sufficient tread and the hole is the right size and it is in the tread, the plug will be fine.
If you are reading this thread, you have to read this link, with info from The Rubber Manufacturers Association, a tire industry trade group. Plugs? How about 12 mill in damages for a repair center using them, and the The Rubber Manufacturers Association weighing in against them… and a blowout is the cause:
I’ve had tires repaired at gas stations that have lasted years. It most likely depends on the state of the tire before the repair. Some tires are on their last legs anyway.