This guide gives a basic understanding of tyres and types of Flat Tyre damage. It will not tell you when your tyre has damage beyond use. Rather it will help explain what may be wrong with your tyre if there is visible damage such as bulges/cracks/leaks.
This guide will also not cover the many different tyre pressures your car might have. But it will give an understanding of what the correct pressure is for your car. And help you check that pressure yourself if required instead of having to take it into a garage. The only real “check-it-yourself” thing here is checking that there are no punctures in your tyres when you get out of the car after driving.
The information here will be useful when choosing Avon Tyres UK too, as I’ll cover different types of tyre construction/designs, suited uses and conditions. Finally, this thread won’t go in-depth about how to change or repair any damage to the tyre itself. The aim here is to give an understanding of how run-Flat Tyre work/how you can tell if your tyre is damaged or not; where to find the damage and what might be wrong with it. If you want to make a thread asking for advice on tyre repairs, please see this guide:
How-To Guide: Fixing Your Tyre And Patching Punctures
You’ll need a certain amount of equipment before you should start any job involving Flat Tyre – without these things, you risk killing yourself or someone else through poor practices. The “tools-of-the-trade” should at least contain items such as 1x Jack, 1x Wheel Wedge & Spanner Set (to undo wheel nuts), 1x Old Towel/Dolly/Bungee Cords, 1x Pen-knife/Small Screwdriver (hacksaw or wire cutters if you can’t find a pen-knife), a small box of assorted nuts and bolts (in case you drop some whilst removing them from your car’s wheels) and last but not least, some lubricating spray such as WD40.
The last of the safety equipment that I will mention is eye protection – goggles at the very least. I know this sounds like overkill to most users here, but believe me, if you end up with a large amount of broken glass in your eyes after an accident where the airbags have gone off; it’ll be worth taking eye protection seriously. You might never need it for tyres near me etc., but who knows what will happen in the future? It’s better to be safe than sorry in my opinion.
Now Onto Tyres Themselves
This article is concerned with “Run Flat” tyres. They are suitable for emergency use when they suffer damage that would render them unusable when inflated under normal circumstances. Most vehicles these days have run-flats as standard equipment. Especially vehicles that are capable of relatively high speeds on the motorway/freeway type roads. They are also available in many modern performance cars.
Run flats are Not Suitable for All Vehicles
They are ideal mainly for cars where speed limits are higher. And running flat out across a desert at 200mph isn’t uncommon. One of the biggest reasons run-flats are so desirable for high-speed travel over long distances is that if you lose air pressure in a normal tyre. It will cause undue stress to your suspension parts – especially at higher speeds.
This causes further damage which may not have even happened yet. Flat Tyre allow tyres to deflate to an extent while being able to be driven on without any noticeable difference in handling until you repair or replace them.
They still give plenty of grips when under-inflated/deflated too because they work by having stiffer sidewalls rather than relying on inflation pressure alone for this.
If you drive onto a nail, screw, bolt or another sharp object while running flat tyres;
There’s a chance of the tyre damaging more than if you had normal tyres. This is because of how run-flats are designed.
If there’s no air pressure in them, they become very stiff so they can roll on their rims any longer. This is where the supposed safety benefit comes from when fitting these types of tyres to your car.
However, whilst on the rim; any sharp object coming into contact with the tyre will deform it and go straight through it easily – thus creating a puncture hole that has to be fixed or repaired before continuing further.
There’s still a risk of blowing chunks out of your sidewall under high-speed cornering too. But this isn’t as common to stiffer sections inside run-flats. If you lose air pressure in a normal Flat Tyre, it will become far softer and deform under the weight of your car. Thus creating a larger buffer zone between it and any hard objects that come into contact with it.
Conclusion :
This is why normal tyres near me are more suitable for lower-speed use than run-flats because they can better deal with sharp objects at lower speeds where chances of them causing puncture damage to the tyre aren’t as high – this means that your suspension life is extended too, by not having to take unnecessary abuse from low speed “jumps” over such things as dangerous manholes/grates in the road etc.