"NY" wrote in message
...
"Rod Speed" wrote in message
...
So far in 40 years driving, I've never had a puncture while I've been
driving (apart from the blow-out when the tyre scraped against the edge
of the tarmac when I was forced off the road by an oncoming tractor) -
all my punctures have been of the sort where the car is fine when I
park,
and then the tyre is flat when I come to drive away

I forgot when I said that about the incident with the drunken old man on a
bicycle who crashed into my dead wheel just after I'd taken it off to
change the tyre (see my posting of 18:44 today for that story).

Most of mine have showed up when driving. With one I could hear the
ticking
of the screw in the tread as I went around the corner and didn't bother
to
do
anything about it because it was on the garage sale run. It did
eventually
end
up visibly well down so I used the real spare. Another time, also on a
garage
sale run, someone pointed it out to me. The Getz doesn't give much
indication
of a flat tyre handling wise. Another on another garage sale run, forget
how
I became aware of that one.

When my dead wheel was run into by the drunk on the bike, I was driving my
mum's Renault 6 with very soft rolling suspension, like many French cars
of the 1970s and 80s. I had a lucky escape because I was probably driving
a bit faster round bends than I should have been (the dreaded "I've passed
my test about a year ago, I'm pretty good at driving now" arrogance -
*not* something I'm proud of) and if the car had gone out of control due
to the tyre overheating and coming off, I'd have probably crashed. As it
is, I didn't feel any difference in handling beforehand. The only things
that made me suspect that something was wrong were the noise of the rim on
the road as it had cut through the tread, and the smell of very hot
rubber. It was scary to think that I had no other sensation of the car
pulling to one side or rolling more on right hand than left hand bends.

Yeah, some like my 73 Golf has an unusual front suspension where
the vertical extension of what the wheel pivots around ends up
outside the point of contact of the wheel on the road. So you
don't get any pulling of the steering wheel with a flat tyre.

I bought the Golf new after the salesman demonstrated
the benefit of that by tearing along at a great rate with
one wheel in the dirt off the side of the road, taking his
hands off the steering wheel and jamming the brakes
on as hard as he could, with no ABS at that time. The
car just skids to a stop in a straight line, no swerving.

Fortunately the rim of the wheel was not dented and could be re-used once
a new tyre was put on it.

Never had a tyre destroyed that bad. I did manage to
drive the Getz with a flat so far before I noticed the
problem that the tyre was internally wrecked so the
puncture couldn't just be fixed. Rubber crumbs inside
which the tyre bloke showed me showing it was a new
tyre time. No big deal, the Getz has dirt cheap tyres.

Nowadays you get "tyre deflation" warnings if a sparrow farts in the wrong
direction, so a tyre would never get that flat without you knowing. Our
Honda's warning system is very sensitive and gives a lot of false
warnings.

Interesting. I have been considering a Civic hatch to replace the Getz but
cant
really find exactly what I want in a small hatch. Just did a 6 hour long
distance
trip yesterday and was wondering if it makes much sense to replace the car
just to get a very fancy cruise control. Otherwise the Getz is fine and is
only
13 years old now. Only failure in that time is that there is now some sort
of
leak where the filler tube for the windscreen washer bottle goes into the
washer bottle itself. Bit fiddly to replace so I havent bothered. The
retaining
clip for the sun visor inside the car has broken but the wrecker posted me
one from a wreck for nothing and its just one screw to replace.

After we had a genuine slow puncture, we had to get one tyre changed, so
there was a brand new tyre and one that had done maybe 10,000 miles on the
same axle. It took several weeks of driving, cancelling the warning
whenever it sounded (and initially, checking that the pressure really
wasn't low) before it stopped alerting us to a problem. I presume it
didn't like the slightly different diameters of the tyres of different
ages. Does a larger (newer) tyre tend to wear down slightly quicker than
an older one on the same axle?

Likely. Bit of a design glitch tho.

Could it be that after a few weeks' driving the difference in diameters
was less pronounced (if the new one had worn down to the same level as the
older one)? Does the relative wear of different ages of tyre depend on a)
whether its steered wheels or the back ones, b) whether the axle is driven
through a differential or totally independent wheels?

Or maybe the sensor got damaged in the tyre change or something.

In our case, it was the rear wheels on a Honda CR-V 4WD, so the rear
wheels *are* driven, even if normally most of the power goes through the
front axle unless that loses traction.