Instead, these vehicles come equipped with an inflation kit and/or a can of sealant.

Sealant is a gooey substance in an aerosol can that’s designed to coat the inside of the tire due to centrifugal force once you get rolling again, hopefully sealing the puncture. These products, such as Fix-A-Flat, have been on the market for decades and tend to work pretty well on a minor puncture. They’re not a permanent fix, however. Your speed should be limited after using Fix-A-Flat type products, and you should see about getting the tire repaired or replaced as soon as possible. In addition, most of these products freeze at temperatures below 32 degrees and may not be usable in cold weather.

The other alternative on new vehicles is an onboard compressor which usually plugs into the cigarette lighter. These little compressors actually work quite well and can refill a tire in a few minutes’ time, getting you back on your way again.

This is all well and good, but…

Many times, a tire which fails at highway speed is going to be shredded by the time you can get off the road, or at least permanently damaged and ruined. No inflation kit or can of sealant can help you in that case.

No tire can be repaired if it has a hole in the sidewall or the shoulder. In that case, you’ve got no other choice but to spring for a new tire.

You can always invest in a spare tire and a jack if you’re really concerned about it, but in many new vehicles, there’s not even space for a spare. As if that weren’t enough…if you do have a spare in your vehicle, remember spares can lose air over time and can even dry rot if they’re never on the ground. Most experts now agree tires have a life expectancy of about six years before dry rot, ozone, and the sun’s UV rays degrade them.

The upshot? You might want to just make sure your AAA membership is paid up!

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In the 19th century, carriages and wagons used steel strips for “tires” on their wheels, with the punishing sort of ride that you’d expect. In later years, they were shod with strips of natural rubber, which was an improvement but was still problematic. Solid rubber still rode pretty rough, and the natural, uncured rubber would get gummy in hot weather and shrink and harden in cold temperatures. Charles Goodyear was able to help with the invention of vulcanized rubber, but the modern tire was still several years off.

By the 1880s, the bicycle was becoming much more popular, and in 1888 Scottish engineer John Dunlop was watching his son struggle with the bone-shaking ride of his tricycle. He then devised the first-ever air-filled pneumatic tire, and a few years later Edouard Michelin developed the first “clincher” pneumatic tire, easily removable for repair.

These advances coincided with the development of the horseless carriage, of course, and soon speeds were starting to pick up and more was expected from tires. Things like inner tubes to hold air and grooved tread patterns for tires soon followed. By the 1910s, engineers were designing tires with angled layers of cotton cord beneath the rubber surface, adding durability and strength, and the bias-ply tire was born. Bias-ply tires would soon become the industry standard and would remain so until the 1960s.

The next big step forward in tire design was Michelin’s radial tire, which featured steel belts and fabric plies that were set at a right angle to the tread instead of layers which crisscrossed at angles. Radials offered longer wear, better handling and road manners and soon became the standard in Europe, but they didn’t really catch on in the US until the 1970s.

Tubeless tires debuted in the 1950s, and tire design continued to evolve with improved rubber formulations, better tread patterns and a variety of new tire designs such as the all-season tire, UHP tires, grand touring tires and other newer developments. Today, things like the run-flat tire and tire pressure monitoring systems have made tires more reliable, safe and long-lasting than ever before!

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Flats vs Blowouts

If you get a blowout, you’ll know about it right away. Sometimes the tire can fail dramatically, with a bang as loud as a shotgun going off. Other times, it might just be a loss of air and a sudden change in your car’s handling, followed by vibration, noise and a pull to one side. If it’s a front tire that fails, your car might be a real handful to drive until you can get to a stop.

In either case, your first job is to pull off the road as quickly (but safely!) as you can. Don’t jam on the brakes or make any sudden moves, just get over to the shoulder and the flattest, hardest surface you can find.

Turn on the emergency flashers and set the parking brake. Locate the jack and tire wrench, remove the wheel cover and break loose the lug nuts with the wrench. Find the proper spot for jacking the car and raise it no higher than necessary to remove the tire and install the spare. Put the spare on, tighten the lugs, lower the vehicle and tighten the lugs the rest of the way once the vehicle is on the ground. If your vehicle is equipped with a space-saver or temporary spare, keep your speed at 55 mph or lower and replace it with a standard tire as soon as possible.

Often it’s not possible to safely jack the vehicle up and change the tire yourself — in which case you should just take advantage of your AAA card and call for help. Also, you may as well kiss that failed tire goodbye — even if it survives the flat without shredding the sidewall, chances are that the heat and low inflation have destroyed it internally.

Preventing a Flat

Check your tires’ condition regularly and look out for foreign objects, dry rot on the sidewalls, bulges or cracks, tread separation or uneven wear.

Rotate your tires regularly — every 5,000 miles — to ensure even wear patterns.

Keep your front end aligned properly to prevent premature wear.

Probably the most important…check your tire inflation regularly! Under-inflated tires mean more rolling resistance, more heat buildup and more wear, which will lead to tire failure.

The post So You Get A Flat Tire…What Now? appeared first on AKEY BRAKEY AUTO REPAIR & SMOG.

Dandelions: Yes, those humble yellow flowers you try to eliminate from your yard. Dandelions actually contain a minute amount of latex in their milky oil, and research shows they can actually produce about as much latex, pound-for-pound, as rubber plants. German scientists have cultivated 1-foot-tall dandelions for just this purpose. This isn’t a new development, either — in WWII, American companies were growing and cultivating Russian dandelions to cope with rubber scarcities due to wartime conditions.
Silica: Tires are a complex blend of many different ingredients. Tires require friction for traction and control, but too much friction means heat buildup and rolling resistance, which hurts fuel economy. Engineers have discovered that mixing silica, the main ingredient in sand, in with carbon black and other elements can cut rolling resistance for better gas mileage. Too much silica means poor tread wear and traction, but manufacturers are aiming to strike the right balance between silica and carbon black in recent designs.
Orange oil: In the search for alternatives to fossil fuels, a major manufacturer has taken the lead in using oil derived from orange peels in tire formulations. Orange oil has been used in cleaning products and other applications for years, but engineers have now figured out how to use it for lowered rolling resistance and better flexibility in tires.
Soybean oil: While it’s still in the development stages, it has been discovered that soybean oil can add up to ten percent to tire life, and can reduce fossil fuel use by up to 8.5 million gallons per year.
Recycling: Vulcanization of rubber has been around since the 1830s. Vulcanized rubber is harder and more serviceable, but unfortunately vulcanization also means rubber which can’t be recycled into tires again. Ironically, the same source that discovered this process has now uncovered a means to “de-vulcanize” rubber so it can be recycled for tire use. Currently, the recovery rate is about 80 percent; if the process can be scaled for mass-market use, it could mean a great solution for recycling the 800 million tires which are scrapped every year.

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Here’s a rundown of current trends in tire technology you may not have been aware of:

Tall, skinny tires are coming back. If you’ve ever ridden a beach cruiser bike vs. a racing bike, you know that skinny tires have lower rolling resistance. Carmakers are going in that direction, too – the BMW i3 electric/plug-in hybrid uses Bridgestone Ecopia tires, with higher inflation pressure and a taller, skinnier profile. Tall, skinny tires also reduce the car’s frontal profile for lowered wind resistance and aerodynamic drag. It isn’t just the BMW i3, either…the Corvette Z51 is going with taller, skinnier tires.
Static electricity can be a problem with tires. Static electricity and an inadequate electrical ground can be a real concern when you’re refueling, or when you’re sliding out of the car. Modern tire compounds feature less carbon black to cut rolling resistance and weight, but that also means a tire that’s less conductive for an electric ground between the vehicle and the road surface. The solution is an “antenna tread” in the tire’s surface – a thin, continuous strip of rubber that serves as an efficient conductor between the tire and pavement so the vehicle is always grounded.
Run-flat tires can make it another 100 miles or more after losing pressure. Tire manufacturers design run-flat tires to cover 50 miles at 50 mph, but at slower speeds you can get a lot more miles than that out of them. The idea is to lessen the amount of heat generated by the tire and reduce the fatigue in the belts and the rubber. Imagine flexing a paper clip…if you bend it back and forth quickly, it’ll break quickly, but if you flex it slowly, it’ll last longer.
There are more than 200 materials in a modern tire. You probably know about Kevlar and nylon and rubber and steel, but you probably didn’t know rubber batches also include metals like cobalt and titanium which help the compound bond with the steel belts. Silane (silicon hydride) is being used to help inorganic silica bond with organic polymers for enhanced traction in wet or wintry weather. Silica is a major ingredient in low-rolling-resistance tires, and silica compounds like silane have been used a lot in the last 10-15 years to enhance performance. Tire companies are also using “green” materials for tires, such as citrus oil to control how tread viscosity and flexibility changes with temperature.

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A single tire that’s down by ten pounds of air means a 3.3 percent drop in fuel economy…multiply that by all four tires, and you can figure on giving up ten percent of your gas mileage. The added friction and rolling resistance also means more heat is generated, and heat is the enemy of the internal structure of a tire. That heat will damage a tire to the point of failure. Studies show that underinflated tires are a full 25 percent more likely to fail, and at least half of one-car accidents involve a tire problem as a factor. And still, it’s estimated that 60 to 80 percent of the vehicles on the road are rolling on tires that are low on air.

The tire pressure monitoring systems on newer cars are all well and good, but what can be done to stabilize tire pressure in vehicles, especially when many drivers just ignore it?

Self-inflating tires are on the horizon. For military vehicles and heavy trucks, self-inflating tires have been around for a while, but they always involved a compressor or air reservoir on the vehicle to supply air. There are now a couple of new, innovative designs for self-inflating tires:

A system from SIT uses a tube chamber near the bead of the tire wall. At its lowest point, the tube is kept closed with the normal deformation of a tire due to the weight of the vehicle. The portion that’s squeezed closed constantly changes as the tire rolls. If the tire pressure drops, sensors and an automatic pressure regulator kick in and the squeezing/releasing action of the tube begins to suck in atmospheric air. When the tire reaches its proper pressure again, a check valve prevents the tube from introducing any more air. The SIT design actually won the 2009 Tire Technology of the Year award at the Tire Technology Expo.

A system designed by Halo uses a pendulum-type mass that’s suspended at the center of the truck wheel. As the wheel rolls, the pendulum swings and drives a self-contained pump which adds air until the desired air pressure is reached. This five-pound unit mounts directly to the wheel’s axle cap, not unlike a hub odometer. While it’s currently only available for heavy trucks, buses and tractor-trailers, the Halo system has been tested for over 8 million miles on various vehicles.
While these self-inflation designs may not be widely used yet, they point the way to a time when having to worry about tire inflation will be a thing of the past. What kind of shape are your tires in? Have you checked their inflation level lately? Give us a call and make an appointment at the shop and let us have a look at your tires!

The post Self-Inflating Tires…Soon To Be A Reality? appeared first on AKEY BRAKEY AUTO REPAIR & SMOG.

Sometimes you may just have to replace tires as you can afford them, one or two at a time, but there are some important things to bear in mind if you have to do that.

If you can only afford to replace one or two tires, it’s essential that you go with tires that are identical (or at least as close as possible) to the car’s remaining tires. That means that internal construction, size, tread pattern and design should be close to the same. Don’t mix winter tires with all-season tires, don’t mix run-flat tires with standard tires, for instance. But why?

Tires are all designed for different handling properties and traction, and are intended to work together as a set. Mixing sizes, tread patterns and designs can mean a car that has unpredictable, jittery, “squirrelly” handling, braking and roadholding properties, and that can be downright dangerous in a panic stop or other emergency situation.

If you have to replace a pair of tires and decide on the same brand and model as the others, the new tires should go on the rear. That might seem counterintuitive to some, but consider this; if you mount the new tires on the front and end up on wet pavement, the new tires will easily disperse the water while the rear tires can hydroplane.

Remember that the minimum tread depth for tires, by state law, is 2/32”. At 2/32”, you should be able to plainly see the wear bars that are molded at a right angle in the base of the tread grooves. If you’re in doubt, insert a penny into the tread grooves, Lincoln head down. If the tread reaches the top of Lincoln’s head, your tread is 2/32” deep. Try again with a quarter – does the tread reach the top of Washington’s head? That’s a depth of 4/32”. One more time with a penny…if the tread reaches the Lincoln Memorial, your tread is 6/32” deep.

If you’re thinking it might be time for a set of tires, don’t put it off…make an appointment and see what kind of price we can make you on a set of premium-brand tires.

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• Regularly check your tire pressure. This one is really, really important. Underinflated tires will wear
unevenly and reduce your fuel economy due to increased rolling resistance. That increased rolling resistance also means more heat, which will break down the tires’ internal structure and shorten their lives. All it takes to shorten a tire’s service life by 25 percent is for it to be underinflated by 5-6 lbs.
• Rotate your tires regularly. No vehicle has even weight distribution from front to rear. The engine puts more weight over the front wheels; in addition, the front tires will wear differently as the vehicle’s weight and momentum shifts to the front while braking. The front tires are also subjected to different forces while cornering. As a result, it’s important to rotate the tires, shifting their positions on the vehicle to even out wear. Rotations should be done every 6,000 miles or so; many drivers have the rotation performed at the same time as an oil change, since the vehicle’s already up on a lift anyway.
• Check your wheel alignment. A vehicle that’s in need of a wheel alignment will wear the front tires unevenly, as the out-of-spec wheel tries to drag the car in a different direction. That’s what also causes the persistent pull to one side while driving in a straight line. Be alert to the signs of poor wheel alignment, and have an alignment performed if necessary.
• Drive sensibly. That means no hard cornering and no wheel spin while taking off.

The post Get The Most Out Of That Set Of Tires appeared first on AKEY BRAKEY AUTO REPAIR & SMOG.

Today’s winter tires are a long way from the heavy, noisy, clumsy “snow tires” or “mud grips” that your dad might have had on his station wagon 40 years ago. Modern winter tires are designed for noise, handling, steering response and road manners that rival grand touring tires, only with enhanced traction. They accomplish that with deeper, more aggressive tread grooves and a tread pattern that’s designed to eject snow and slush for a clean “bite” with every revolution of the wheel.

More importantly, the tread compound used for winter tires is substantially different. Grand touring or all-season tires can stiffen at low temperatures, reducing traction. Winter tire formulations are designed to stay flexible even when temperatures are at zero or below, meaning they can still deliver traction in winter conditions. Some winter tires come pre-drilled for studs, which can enhance traction even more in snow and light icy conditions.

There are a few things to remember with winter tires, however:
• Winter tires often don’t handle as precisely as all-season tires, due to their construction. That may not matter much in snow, when handling will be sloppy and treacherous anyway, but it can be a noticeable difference on dry pavement.
• Winter tires tend to be noisier
• Winter tires are rather fragile. That same soft rubber compound that helps with traction in snow means that the tires will wear down much more quickly in warmer temperatures. For that reason, winter tires should not be used when temperatures are above 35-45 degrees.
• If you elect to go with winter tires, you’ll need to get an entire set and not just a pair. Mixing designs of tires can result in poor traction, uneven and unpredictable performance and a “schizophrenic” car.

With all that in mind, you’re going to be the best judge of whether you really need winter tires or not. If your part of the country gets a few inches of snow that typically melts in a few days or a week, when the weather changes, winter tires might not be a real necessity. If you’re in a place like the upper Midwest, New England or the mountains, with snow measured in feet rather than inches and winter temperatures that stay below freezing for weeks on end, winter tires might be a good investment after all. If you’re leaning that way on the decision, call us and let us get you the best deal on quality winter tires that you’ll find anywhere!

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• Tires: It’s a good idea to have your tires rotated every 5,000-7,000 miles to ensure even wear. With that in mind, it’s easy to just schedule a tire rotation with every oil change, since the vehicle will be up in the air on a lube rack anyway. Have you checked your inflation lately? Your proper
inflation levels will be on a sticker on the driver’s side door frame, inside the fuel filler door or in the owner’s manual – always check the inflation when the tires are cold. How about the tread depth? 2/32” is the minimum tread depth allowed in most states. Here’s an easy way to check your tread depth: take a penny and insert it into the tread grooves, Lincoln head down. If the rubber comes up past the top of Lincoln’s head, your tread is at 2/32” or more. Try it again with a quarter; if the tread reaches the top of Washington’s head, it’s at 4/32”. Now, one more time with a penny; if it reaches the Lincoln Memorial, your tread is 6/32” deep.

• Alignment: It’s tiring to fight with a vehicle whose steering wheel constantly wants to drift to one side, but it’s more than that. Poor wheel alignment means poorer fuel economy, as one wheel is dragged along by the others. It also means money wasted through uneven tire wear…have you had your alignment checked lately?

• Finish: Snow, ice and winter weather are pretty rough on your car’s paint and body. A coat or two of wax before winter really sets in can help your car shed water and protect your finish.

• Wipers: Even the best windshield wipers are only good for about a year, before the elements and the sun’s UV rays start to take their toll. Examine your wipers carefully for dry-rot, cracking, strips, chips or chunks missing. Hint: a fresh application of Rain-X on your vehicles windows and windshield can help wet-weather visibility immensely.

• Fluids: As part of your vehicle’s regular preventive maintenance schedule, check the last time you had an oil change, transmission fluid flush and coolant flush. If it’s time…get ‘em done!

We hope that the holidays for you and your family are great this year. You can’t control everything, but you can help eliminate one worry by making sure you’re got a solid vehicle to take on holiday trips – make an appointment with us and we’ll make sure you’re good-to-go.

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