December Top Ten ‘Tyres and Tyre troubles’- Stories provided by our network of local commercial tyre fitters and from our fleet management services team.
1. It has been wet and muddy across the UK for a lot of our new mobile tyre fitters and it is still the same for many now. None more so than this building site in Chesterfield. where we were called to a puncture repair for a 500/60R22.5 on a 9 Ton Dumper Truck. This Starco off side front tyre had to be thoroughly cleaned first to be able to find and then repair this plant tyre breakdown. With a tread depth of 20 mm it should now go on to work the building sites for some time to come.
2. Our mobile van tyre road service team near Droitwich fixed this 265/60R18, near side rear Continental tyre in just 34 minutes. The picture shows bubbling where the puncture is after the wheels were removed to enable the tyre repair. The M5 and surrounding areas are regular haunts for our roadside assistance commercial tyre repairers.
3. This vehicle has a new lorry tyre and wheel now after our fitter in Walsgrave discovered that the 385 /65r22.5 fitted to a super single trailer in the OSF position had low tread and cuts to the cords. The vehicle belongs to a global fruit distribution brand. The old Samson 160K tyre that was removed had a tread depth of only 2mm, so close to the legal limit of 1.00MM. It was replaced with a new goodyear tyre and valve and a 11.75 X 22.5 centre nave wheel was also fitted as old one was badly rusted. Our truck tyre fleet management service took one hour to complete the entire job as part of fleet tyre management and tyre maintenance service. This job was part of our fleet tyres services programme, the old tyre was sent to the casing bank for re-treading.
4. This emergency truck tyre call out on the M6 Southbound between junction 2 and 3, was not as straightforward as first thought. Removal of one of the wheel nuts revealed that the stud had been cross threaded previously and so the fitter advised the driver not to move the vehicle and called a mechanic to fix that problem as it wasn’t something that he could do. Subsequently, the Dunlop 295/80r22.5 front position tyre was replaced with a new Samson tyre. The Dunlop tyre suffered run flat damage and it was sent back to a casing bank. A re-torque was also carried out and the emergency truck tyre replacement took 45 minutes to complete.
5. This 205/65r17.5 trailer tyre, Michelin X multi T2 tyre was unusually replaced with a spare tyre that the customer owned and supplied themselves. Our mobile hgv truck tyres fitter also carried out a 30 min retorque which was requested by the driver. The replaced trailer tyre was an OSMI (off side middle inner). The job was handled by our 24 hour call out commercial tyres service as it was an out of hours as job attended in the morning 06:37AM. The tyre replacement call out took 2hr 3 minutes in total including the re-torque and the old tyre that was removed had low tread possibly, contributing to it being blown out and it went back with the driver. The roadside hgv tyre replacement took place at Burton In Kendal Moto Services on the M6.
6. This is an interesting one for the truck tyre quick witted amongst you, what is the problem with this image. For the rest of us it shows a mismatch between the 315/70r22.5 NSRO Hankook DH31 tyre that was fitted next to the old rolling mate of its partner tyre, which was a Bridgestone that had low tread and irregular wear and needed replacing. The driver was advised about the large mismatch on the tread on the inner as well but the customer only wanted the outer fitting at the time. The mismatch has perhaps never been greater, as can be seen in the picture. The job location was near Goole and took just 28 minutes to complete.
7. I can think of better places to be than the northbound, exit slip on junction 31 of the M6 at 2:30 AM but that was where our commercial tyre 24 7 fitter had to be to fix these 2 blowouts. Both front position 185/70r13c trailer tyres were fitted along with, two new valves in a just 39 minutes including a re-torque at 115NM. The brand of the old Trailer tyres were Landsail. The report says that the old trailer tyres were scrapped but from the image it doesn’t look like there was much left to scrap! The customer also incurred an out of hours charge so underpinning the financial value of regular maintenance and a reminder about the Tyrenet fleet tyre management service and our portal for fleet managers so that you can review the status of each tyre on every vehicle on-line.
8. Spot the bent tyre valve which was replaced as part of this out of hours commercial tyre repair. During this truck tyre breakdown service a 315/70R22.5 Falken tyre repaired on the off side front wheel along with the tyre valve and a High Pressure valve cap. The commercial tyre fitter also carried out a 30 minute retorque to 600NM and a risk assessment. In total this job took 1hr 3 minutes at a site near Uttoxeter not far from the A50.
9. This 24 hour commercial tyre call out was what we’d describe as a ‘plant job’ i.e. a tyre repair on a non-road vehicle which in this case was a 3 ton Dumper truck but could be anything from a crane on a building site to a forklift truck at a factory. For this 295/80R15.3 Front Starco tyre had a big bar go through the tyre and out of the sidewall, it was repaired as a temporary repair to get the vehicle moving for now but the customer was told by our fitter that it would need a new replacement tyre asap. Located near Newark the job took 31 minutes to complete.
10. This job was booked in for early hours the next day near the A24 at Ashington north of Worthing. It had clearly come into contact with some solid object that had caused the 8.25R15 Michelin tyre to fail. As this was not deemed to be a lorry tyre emergency call out, it will have sat for some hours overnight on its rim so that when the new tube was fitted the next day and inflated, two bulges appeared on the side wall. This indicated that the tyre was weak and our emergency truck tyre fitter advised that it will require a replacement tyre. Bulges in the sidewall of the tyre can clearly be seen in the picture. The repair job took 40 minutes to complete first time around with more time to be spent on this one with a truck tyre replacement needed now too.
Our next Tyre Tribulations blog will be the first batch from 2023 and we’ll try to include some examples of mobile van tyre fitting too as truck tyre road services seemed to dominate this issue.
Have a Happy and Safe 2023 and we hope we can be of service when you need us, ideally for routine maintenance rather than for an emergency call out but either way we’ll be there to get your vehicles moving in under 90 minutes.
