Backing out of the drive yesterday I realised I had what I thought was a puncture. Fortunately still being at home it was a quick job to remove the affected wheel and replace it with the spare tyre. (Sometimes you can be grateful for being old school). When I got home I carefully looked round the tread and both sidewalls but other than the odd bit of grit there was nothing. The pressure in the tyre was zero, so absolutely flat. Being tight with my money I avoided rushing straight off to the local tyre dealer for a pair of new tyres - the tread is down to about 3mm on both sides so a puncture repair would been better spent on a new tyre and as I like to keep the tyres on the same axle as close to identical as possible it would have been a case of replacing both tyres.

I have a large capacity plastic trug, I half filled that with water and, after partially inflating the tyre (about 25 psi), I was able to rotate the wheel/tyre through the water a section at a time. After three rotations there was still no sign of a stream of bubbles, not even from the valve, which was my second suspect after a puncture. I inflated the tyre to 40psi (I usually run it at 33psi) and after 24 hours this afternoon it was still holding at 40psi.

I've now refitted it back on the car but I'm bemused as to why it should fully deflate - it was sat under the car port after I used it the previous day. I even wondered about someone letting it down as a prank but firstly "Why?" and if you did that would you bother to replace the dust cap? And nothing was picked up on the security camera that covers the drive and car port, although that's not a guarantee as despite being a Tapo model I've found it not to be 100% reliable, just better than nothing.

As far as I can remember I've not had a puncture repair in this set of tyres and if a repair had failed I can't believe it would self repair. There's no kerbing (curbing) on the wheel that might suggest a failure of the seal between the wheel and the tyre. I'm totally bemused.

Has this ever happened to anyone else or has anyone any thoughts on what might have happened?

Other than alloy wheel corrosion requiring scrubbing the wheel and resealing, which normally gives a slow puncture effect ! I've had that on a few older Subarus.

28 minutes ago, Prezafab said:

Other than alloy wheel corrosion requiring scrubbing the wheel and resealing, which normally gives a slow puncture effect ! I've had that on a few older Subarus.

Ditto on our Octavia Scout. Mainly on the offside but lumpy roads also.

36 minutes ago, Prezafab said:

Other than alloy wheel corrosion requiring scrubbing the wheel and resealing, which normally gives a slow puncture effect ! I've had that on a few older Subarus.

I literally had one of my alloys cleaned and rim sealed due to air loss by the rim on Saturday morning.

2013 alloys on a mk2 octavia

Edited Monday at 18:563 days by mac11irl
Timeframe added

Had a similar experience of late turned out to be a leaking valve...

Thanks for these ideas. I would have thought the leaking valve would have shown up with bubbles through the water because it lost all the air within less than a day but I wasn't aware of the wheel corrosion issue. The alloys are now over 13 years old and 100,000 miles. That might also tie in with the complete deflation but once reinflated/over-inflated it seating itself. All was looking good at 8pm this evening so I'm crossing my fingers and waiting to see what the pressure is in the morning. Thanks again.

I had similar problem. Very slight corrosion on alloys and tyre leaked at bead seal I checked before reinflating as my compressor was borrowed and it was around 25psi and a few bubbles were spotted. Reckon a flake of paint may have caused it and cleared itself once reinflated to proper pressure at garage. Eventually it started to deflate again so I got the local tyre service to remove and clean rim and reseat tyre. Been good since. Never had a bead seal go on steel but alloys seem to be prone.

Alasdair

I had a 'puncture' quite a fw years ago that I couldn't find. Turned out to be a small sticker on the bead of the tyre that had a crack in it, leaking air through the middle of the sticker. Sticker removed, no further issues.

Makes you wonder what sort of clown production planner demands that any labels end up being placed in that zone - I've noticed a label being there in the past and thought that that was a really really dumb place to put a sticker.

My main, so far, problem with alloys is, where I get mine powder coated mainly to reduce leaks and improve appearance, they hang the cleaned/stripped wheels up using a steel hook through the valve hole - so no powder coating etc ever gets on a small area "across" the valve sealing point, but salty winter road does and then after only 2 or 3 years, I'm back to having a slow tyre leak! I handed in 5 wheels but only 4 had tyres on them, so when I found that on the 5th wheel I sorted it out before getting a tyre and valve put on it. The other issue with this "specialist company" is, they powder coat the inner hub contacting face on wheels - and VW Group factory fitted alloy wheels, in my experience, never have anything on that area of new wheels, so I strip that area clean before using newly powder coated wheels.

Thanks for your further thoughts. I inflated the tyre to 40psi and then dropped it to my usual 33psi and all seemed well for a couple of short runs. Then I had to make a longer trip along the A27 between Havant and Chichester, the direct route but for about 8 miles it has no junctions. About half way along the tyre noise ominously changed and by the time I was able to get safely out of the carriageway the pressure had dropped to just over 20psi. Took the wheel to Kwik-Fit for a repair only to be told it wasn't repairable; in this case I had unknowingly run the tyre flat for about 100m when I drove out of the drive and back in on that first day so I can believe that the sidewalls had been damaged although I'm surprised how these days so many punctures "can't be fixed" and you have to have a new tyre. More regulation than in the old days perhaps?

Not the end of the world, the rear tyres had both been picked up at MOT in May as advisory because of a deep cut through the tread but not to the cords and I was down to around 3mm of tread so I'm changing them both tomorrow. What did surprise me was the range of prices quoted - for me Halfords were nearly £100 cheaper than Kwik-Fit although my wallet will still be £350 lighter by tomorrow night. (A couple of other sites were very close to the Halfords price so Kwik-Fit were very much the outlier). The bill would have been higher if I had 17" rather than the "special" 16" wheels as the larger tyre comes in £25-£30 dearer per tyre. So thank you those early members on this forum that let me joining the 16" Special Wheels Club back in 2013.

I'm pretty sure 100m at 20psi and lowish speeds wouldn't be the reason the tyre was not repairable.

The thing can be, if they spot any marking on the inner surface of the tyres - like that that will be caused when a car has been moved with a flat tyre, then nowadays typically they will declare the tyre to be unrepairable.

Kwikfit tyre pricing, at least in the past, Kwikfit can offer 2 prices, one for booking online and another for turning up and asking - you can easily work out which one will be lower without putting it to the test.

Last time I had a slow puncture, I made sure that I stuck a trolley jack under that side/end of the car to avoid it even resting on a deflated tyre.

My older daughter seemed to get lucky when she drove her car round to her tyre place last year with a very soft/flat tyre, I warned her not to plan to try that trick again as it could get expensive, it sounds like it happened again for her last week - I've not heard what the outcome was yet!

4 hours ago, rum4mo said:

The thing can be, if they spot any marking on the inner surface of the tyres - like that that will be caused when a car has been moved with a flat tyre, then nowadays typically they will declare the tyre to be unrepairable.

Kwikfit tyre pricing, at least in the past, Kwikfit can offer 2 prices, one for booking online and another for turning up and asking - you can easily work out which one will be lower without putting it to the test.

I guess these days everyone has to err to the side of caution - in the "old days" the advice would probably been "we can give it a try and see how you get on" and 95% of the time the tyre would be fine and in the 5% of cases we would have shrugged our shoulders and said it was worth a try. Nowadays the 5% would probably end up as a law suit as failing in duty of care. It's the world we live in.

I did check Kwik-Fit on line so knew they were comparatively expensive but when the technician phoned to tell me I'd need a new tyre I said I'd be wanting two but at that price Kwik-Fit weren't competitive and really expected a "Let's see what we can do, what prices are you looking at" and an offer in the same ball park as everyone else. But the price was the price so the sale has gone elsewhere. Maybe for Kwik-Fit no sale is better than a sale with a smaller profit because I can't see they would be paying more for tyres than their competitors. And if Kwik-Fit had come back with a revised figure within a few pounds of the Halfords price I'd have got the tyres there - Kwik-Fit is convenient for me and I'm now of an age where getting the absolute lowest price isn't important to me; I just don't want to feel I've paid way over the odds.