"dennis@home" wrote in message
...
The last puncture I had I drove a couple of miles on the M^ roadworks to
avoid stopping on a live lane, its fine as long as you can do at least 50
to keep the tyre up by centripetal forces.
Then I had the RAC come and change it while I watched from behind the
barriers.

So far I've been lucky and never had a puncture when I've been on a
motorway. Changing a nearside wheel at least gives you a bit of protection
from passing traffic, but I think I might break with a habit of a lifetime
and call out RAC for one on the offside. The only time I ever needed to call
them out for a puncture was when I couldn't unscrew the wire basket that
held the spare under the boot floor because the thread had seized up. It
took the RAC man about half an hour with applications of WD40, blowlamp
(shielded from tyre) and a lot of cursing to get it free. It would have been
easy if the bolt had had a proper hexagonal wheelnut head, but it was a
circular head with a single U-shaped depression in which you were supposed
to insert the flattened end of the wheelbrace - a really useless cack-handed
design which meant that neither he nor I could get any purchase on the bolt
to turn it.

About the only time I've broken down on a motorway was when the fan belt
failed - and luckily it was only about a mile to the junction where I'd
planned to come off anyway, and only another two miles to a garage where I
know I could wait away from the traffic. I just had to allow for the
steering being a *lot* heavier because the "fan belt" drives the power
steering. Inevitably as with so many thing on a modern car, the RAC man
couldn't fit a new belt (it's a major job even for a garage to do) so he
just had to tow me home and I popped it round to my local garage afterwards.

I wouldn't have liked to wait half an hour in the cold and rain outside my
car on the motorway - I judged that I'd have plenty of battery to drive the
car (including lights) without an alternator without having to stop
immediately.

Sadly the garage didn't notice *why* the fanbelt had failed: one of the
pulleys had a distorted flange. So after shelling out about £400 for part
and labour, the new belt failed a few hundred miles later - and the garage
denied all liability for parts and labour, even when faced with a statement
from the main-dealer garage where I took my car for the second belt. So I
stopped using them after that, and mentioned my experience to as many locals
as possible.