A couple of weeks ago, my tired went flat. When I went to fix it, the tire dealer said there was a screw in it.
The same thing happened tonight – tire pressure down with a screw in the tread.
Is it even likely that a screw works its way into a tire? Or is this move likely deliberate?
I can see a screw puncturing a tire much like a nail. Is there some reason for someone to “screw” with you? Do you live near a construction area?
As unlikely as it is, it might be something as silly as someone having a box of screws bounce out of the back of their truck and you managed to pick up two of them over a few days. Or, it might have happened at the same time and one took longer to go flat than the other.
Once I found a nail in my tire. In the tread, just like your screw.
ETA: I meant to add that I left it there because the tire wasn’t leaking.
Definitely. The rubber in the tread is flexible enough that a screw has no problem getting pushed through, just like a nail. Way back when I worked at a shop that did tires, screws were probably the most common piece of road debris to find still stuck in a flat tire. Not that they necessarily were more likely to cause a puncture than a nail, but the threads helped keep them in place afterwards.
I remember Gomer (or maybe Goober) once making the comment that he doesn’t understand why people yank on things they find in their tires. If they come out, they’re just follows it. I always tell people that. They’ll come to me and say ‘can you pull this nail/screw out of my tire’ and I’ll usually, say ‘it’s fine for now, just leave it alone until you can get it fixed. If I pull it out, you’ll have a flat’.
I drove with a nail in one of my tires for months.
1 screw is a rare event. The probability of 2 screws means there’s a box of them spilled on the ground somewhere on your route or someone is messing with you. Do a walk around every day for a couple of weeks before driving.
We had a roofing company dump a box off a truck. I stopped and picked them up for about 1/8 of a mile. It would have been ugly if I hadn’t done that. Stuff happens.
My wife has probably had 10 flats over the years, almost all due to screws and nails.
I think she drives closer to the shoulder than most and therefore picks up some of the junk that is closer to the edge of the road.
A screw will definitely work its way in enough to cause a slow leak; the weight of the car is pounding it in with each revolution.
If it starts slowly going flat, take it to a gas station and they’ll put a plug in it for a nominal fee (maybe ten bucks). Depending on where the screw is they can do so without taking the wheel off.
After the fourth or fifth time with my wife I bought a tire plug kit. It works like a charm.
Screw in a tire
as in “How many drivers does it take to …” ?
Tires have a way of picking up those things. How it happens is beyond my imagination. I had to have a leaking tire fixed because it had a screw in it. It wasn’t some pointy screw. It was one of those screws that is used to attach a wall plate to a switch box. It was flat on the end. How it made its way into the tire baffles me. Anybody that was going to flat a tire intentionally wouldn’t use an a screw like that.
I was in a tire shop and they had a jar of objects that they had pulled out of flat tires. It was quite an assortment of things.
It can happen. I went 15 years without a flat tire and then got three of them in 3 months in three separate places really far apart. One was a caused by a nail and the other two were bizarre. One of those was caused by a large piece of what looked like a piece of a bike rack and the other was a piece of metal embedded in the inner sidewall in a tire that I just replaced two weeks before from the previous incident. It still had insurance and the tire shop replaced it for free but they were scratching their head trying to figure out how it happened at all and I couldn’t figure it out either. I haven’t had any tire problems since then and don’t expect to. Sometimes bad luck just runs in streaks.
You think a screw is crazy? When I worked at a dealership I saw a tire that was punctured by a house key!
One of my employees once managed to pick up a (car) door handle. He drove over an accident scene and I guess they didn’t sweep that up.
A few years ago my dad had a flat and they handed him something that looked just like this. About an inch and half wide, maybe three inches long and half a hole at one end. I didn’t know what it was, but he took one look at it and said ‘that’s a broken piece of a leaf spring’.
Nails, screws, bits of metal and glass are all common causes of tire punctures. Especially if you or a neighbor just had the house re-shingled.
I had a blowout and a flat this year on my new 'mobile. I really dislike the stock tires but I’m between jobs and can’t afford the ones I want to get. I’ve only ever had a flat once before, despite some wild driving maneuvers. It was caused by a roofing nail. I don’t know what caused the blowout on my brand-new car last year but a small wheel-weight from another vehicle caused my latest pressure loss and escaping air. Luckily, it was repairable.
“Two. The trick is getting them inside.”?
FWIW that is a really inferior way to patch a leak and is not recommended by the people that make tires.
Rick, you’re the expert, and the poster I trust the most on car stuff here, but I’ve had a few plug repairs, none of them with patching, and all of them have been adequate for the life of the tire, IME.
OP, I’ve had, unfortunately, multiple screw hits driving on the shitty tracks they call roads in Houston. I think you’re just unlucky, is all.
Worst, I hade just gotten my motorcycle back on the road (many moons ago). It needed a brand new tubeless rear tire to get me rolling. Two weeks afterward, the damn thing went flat. Looking at it, there was a 3-inch screw stuck in the sidewall area about half an inch up the side. The debate was wheter to replace a $150 difficult-to-find tire on a $500 old bike that was likely to give up the engine ghost soon (cam chain slapping around inside also…) That parked it permanently.
Several hundred pounds concentrated on a small area can do some interesting things.
Adding to odd things that have caused a flat tire - I had a small philips screwdriver ruin a tire. No idea how I managed to run over that in such a manner as to puncture the tire! I kept the screwdriver.
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