You may be spending money you don’t need to when it comes to punctured tyres.
Take a scan through the forum pages of websites like pistonheads.com or simply type the above question into your search engine and it won’t take you long to find several examples of drivers who have sustained tyre damage and are looking for advice from their peers before taking their tyre to a service depot.
The simple reason for this is that there is a certain level of distrust among consumers that they may simply be told that the tyre is scrap in order that the tyre service makes a sale. Let us state clearly that it is our opinion that no tyre dealer would ever lie to achieve a sale. There can however be some confusion as to what is repairable and what is not, this article hopes to clear up the situation.
Major vs Minor
Look on the websites of any tyre dealer, large or small, that has a section pertaining to repairs and you will see an image such as these:
So guidelines are very straight forward right? There is a repairable area – area “t” – usually said to be 70% of the nominal section width of the tyre (this actually refers to tyres of 200mm width or more, smaller tyres have a smaller percentage), anything outside this area and the tyre should be replaced.
What is different here?
This picture raises a crucial point. The vast majority of tyre services are licensed to carry out MINOR repairs to tyres only. So when they tell you that the tyre is unrepairable, according to their specifications, it is.
Let’s take a little look at the documentation, namely the British Tyre Manufacturers’ Association bsau159f document which carries a subject title of Minor repairs to passenger car and light van tyres. Simply type bsau159f into a search engine to see the full document, we’ll only look at the important parts for the scope of this article here.
It’s easy to see that this is where their information is coming from. Looking a little further we see a set of rules to follow in section 1c) that upon initial inspection of the tyre, would negate a repair:
Crucially, in section 3 we see this:
GF Tyre Solutions is a certified MAJOR repair specialist, providing VULCANISED rubber repairs to all sizes of tyres from car, lawn mower, 4×4 tyres through truck and tractor to earth mover tyres, all with the same science involved and always with our professional approach and attention to detail. We would never pass back tyres we didn’t have complete faith in. So for complete peace of mind when running your repaired tyre, ask the experts.
How do we do it?
Please view our inspection and repair process videos.
