addressing the slow leak in my tire

You may remember in July I brought my rig to a tire shop . They said the slow leak was from the valve core. The tire kept losing air so I determined to do something about it.

failures to find the leak

I could fill the tire with my 12v pump before relos but after sitting for 14d it’d need another fill. I tried each time to find the leak by visual inspection and by the soap water method. No go.

preparation

I ordered a tire plugging kit and decided I’d try it out on the misbehaving tire if the damage was amenable to such a repair. I tried to plug a tire about 10 years and failed; at the bottom I’ll talk about why this time was different.

I knew my spare was in good condition (better than the existing rears, in fact) so I jacked up the van and removed the flat tire. I took down the spare and confirmed it was holding pressure; it’d lost ~5lb over the last year or so.

I rolled the flat over to a tree and washed it off¹ for a clear few. I used a pick to remove gravel and other debris that might be obscuring the problem.

finding the culprit

After the clean-up I put soapy water on the tire while rotating it to get a clear view of the tread.

There you are. A tiny hole was blowing occasional bubbles. It was hard enough to find that I thought I might have trouble locating it again. I pushed a small white rock into the tread behind it for easy reference. There were no other leaks that I found.

plugging the tire

The 10-ply truck tires are really tough and I could not force the reamer in, even with the provided lube.

I got out the drill and started with thin bits, opening it up little by little. By the time I got up to 11/64ths the lubed reamer could be shoved in with significant effort.

I reamed per the instructions and re-aired the tire to spec pressure per the instructions.

With the reaming finished but the reamer still jammed in the hole I prepared the string injector with a fresh piece of gummy string. Lubed the tip per instructions, yanked out the reamer and stuffed in the strings to the prescribed depth. I pulled the injector out and trimmed the strings flush with the tire.

The top of the string plug expanded where it was outside the tire, making the repair looks larger than it was. I re-aired to spec (80lbs) and soapy-watered it again; success!

Since this tire has less tread than the previous spare I left the spare on and this one will be the new spare.

conclusion

The kit was $25. While I have gotten tires patched for $10-$15 dollars before in places like El Paso and Laredo Nuevo it’s usually $20 these days. And I tend to pick up a lot of nails. The kit came with so many strings that they’ll probably dry out before I use them all.

So why did it work this time and not before? My take is:

1. in both cases the hole needed to be opened up more to take the reamer but I didn’t know that then
2. previously I either missed or ignored the instructions to bring the tire back up to pressure for the repair. Much easier when the tire is fully stretched by air pressure.

comments

lemmy comment thread for this post
mastodon comment thread for this post

1. with harvested rainwater, yay! ↩