Fixing a hole.

On Sunday of last weekend Susan announced that the car had a flat tyre. I was peeved because the tyres are only two years and two days old and in my experience a hole in a tubeless tyre means it has to be replaced. I checked the tyre over and even though it had lost half its air I couldnt find anything obviously wrong. So I pumped it up and a couple of hours later, after checking it hadn't deflated, we went on our way.

On the Monday morning it was obvious we had a problem - the tyre was soft but not deflated, so Susan went to Cossons in Bossay-sur-Claise, where they plugged the tyre. It's a new process for me, but one you can do at home with the right $7 kit from ebay. You can probably even do it without removing the wheel.

First you reduce the tyre pressure to 1 bar (15psi), then you remove the object that caused the puncture, in our case a small screw. Then you use a spiral probe to bore the hole out a slightly larger diameter.

Next step is to put a piece of repair strip through the eye of the awl, making sure the sides are equal in length.

You then put a thin coat of the glue on the probe and push it into the hole, making sure you coat the sides. Pull the probe out and immediately push the awl and repair strip into the hole - about 2/3 of the length of the strip.

Twist the awl through 360 degrees - this will cut the end of the repair strip - and extract it.

The wet patch is where water and detergent was used to find the hole.

Fill the tyre with air to correct pressure.

Job done.

We were really happy about this - it cost 10euros and was done instantly. I may even buy a kit so I can do it myself in future.