BMW with a puncture in Watford WD25

A new customer called to say that his 3 series BMW had a puncture and could we come and fix it for him.

Spoke to the customer and he said he had run flats tyres on the car, this means a puncture repair would not be possible. Picked up a replacement tyre and headed off to the job to fit the tyre.

Got to the job, he had 2 BMW's on the drive and it was obvious which tyre was at fault. The NSR (back passenger side). The car was sitting with the tyre totally flat, this is not normal for a run flat as they are designed to support the weight of the car via the tyre side wall, so something was very adrift.

Jacked up the car and removed the wheel, the inside of the tyre had totally been destroyed, the tyre had been run for a long time after the air had come out of it. He asked if we could just fit the new tyre, I inspected the rim and found out why he had a puncture, the wheel rim was cracked and this was allowing the air to escape. This means that a new tyre could not be fitted as the air would just leak out and the new tyre would also be damaged.

Showed the customer the crack and explained the situation, we have an engineering shop that can weld up the cracked rim but being a weekend we would not be able to get the job done until Monday.

He had wanted to use the car on Monday and as the car did not have a spare the car would have to be left on axel stands while the repair was being done.

He then said that he actually preferred the wheels on the other BMW and would we be able to swap the wheels, we said that even though the tyre size was the same between the 2 cars we could not be sure they would fit until we took them off and checked the J size and wheel offset.

He was happy for us to check so we jacked up the other car and removed the wheel and checked the J size and offset of the wheel. Luckily they were identical so a direct swap was possible.

Started the swap and ended up with the 4 wheels on the car he wanted to use and 3 wheels on the unused car with an axel stand on the NSR. I must say that the wheels did look much better on the car he wanted to use.

Checked all the tyre pressures on both cars and checked the wheel nuts had been torqued correctly and put a little sticker on each wheel once complete. He asked why we put a sticker on the wheel and told him that it was a visible indication that the wheel was correctly torqued in case we got talking to a customer and forgot to correctly tighten the wheel.

Loaded the cracked rim onto the van so it could be repaired on Monday. He gave us the locking wheel nut for that war and the wheel bolts so we could just drive past and fit the wheel while he was not present, we would just drop the locking wheel nut key through the door.

So if you have a puncture or a cracked wheel rim call Hometyre on 0800 783 93 10 and we will come to you