Can breakdown people fit tyres to wheels?

A friend has a car with one of those stupid space-save spare wheels which is subject to severe distance and speed restrictions.

When she goes on long journeys where she may be unable to get to a tyre garage during their opening hours (eg when travelling in the evening) she intends to carry a spare tyre (yes, tyre, not wheel and tyre), in the belief that breakdown people such as RAC, AA, Green Flag will be able to fit the tyre to the existing wheel that has a puncture, and then be able to inflate and balance the wheel.

I think it sounds highly unlikely that breakdown people will be able to do this in the field, and they will simply fit the space-saver spare and tell her to go to a garage to get the full-size tyre repaired or replaced.

Am I right?

I'd say that her best plan is to buy a cheap wheel (steel rather than alloy) of the appropriate type, get a garage to fit the tyre to it, and then carry the whole wheel-and-tyre assembly for fitting if needed.

How *are* people supposed to manage with these space-saver spare wheels if they get a puncture at a time when garages are not open?

Reply to
Martin Underwood
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This is probably right. They might be able to mount the thing in the field but they won't be able to balance it.

Yes, and a trip to a junkyard will probably get her a wheel for very little money.

I don't know, I think the doughnut was one of the worst ideas to come along, until we got run-flats. Run-flats can still be driven if the tread is punctured, so the car makers don't bother including any spare at all. The thing is, just about every flat I have ever had was caused by some sort of damage to the sidewall, which run-flats can't deal with any better than standard tires.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

I can't speak for where you are, but in the US, you are right. The guy who comes out to meet you on the road is going to put the spare wheel on and maybe put air in it. That's it. They do not carry the equipment to mount a tire on a wheel.

Good advice. If her car has adequate space in the spare tire well, put it in there and leave the temporary spare at home.

They are supposed to find a place to stop within the 50 mile useful range of the temporary spare and spend the night in a local motel until the tire shop opens in the morning. God help them if the spare is also flat.

In practice, with about a million miles driven, I have never needed to use a temporary spare for more than a few miles. She is probably being overly paranoid.

Reply to
E Meyer

Depends on where she's going.

When I lived in MI, I kept a spare wheel and tire for SWMBO's car (which had a space saver spare, and the spare tire well wasn't big enough to fit a full size wheel/tire) in the garage, because flats were somewhat common likely due to the exceptionally shitty roads. I think she had two or three in the year that we lived there. She didn't carry it with her though because she didn't typically drive too far distance-wise from the house.

If I were taking off across country, and planned on traveling through some areas where services might be few and far between, I'd likely go ahead and throw it in the trunk just for insurance. It sucks having to either a) drive 45 MPH for an hour or so to get to the next truck stop, and hope that you can buy a cheap used real tire there or b) knowingly exceed the speed rating of the donut and hope that nothing bad happens.

Also, if you have a flat on the drive axle, then you have to swap TWO tires because you really don't want to have significantly mismatched tires on the drive axle for any significant distance. doubly so if your car has a LSD.

nate

Reply to
N8N

I think over the past 20 years of driving, almost every flat tyre I've had (maybe somewhere between 5 and 10 instances) has been in the evening when I've come out of work or else I've been about to start a long journey (a couple of hundred miles), and I've found the car sitting on a flat tyre. Certainly all the tyre repair garages would have been closed.

Since I've always gone for a car with a proper spare wheel rather than a toy one, it's been a mere few minutes' work (*) to change the wheel and then I've been on my way - usually calling in at a petrol station to check the pressure of the spare and inflate it if necessary, although as I usually check the spare when I check the rest of the tyres (every month or so), the chances of the spare being low are reasonably remote.

(*) Apart from one embarrassing occasion when I found that I couldn't unscrew the cage under the boot/trunk that holds the spare wheel: the nut had rusted onto the long bolt that goes through from the inside of the boot. Sadly the bolt had a crappy way of engaging with the wheelbrace (it had a very wide slot like a screw head instead of a proper hexagonal nut of the same size as the wheel nuts), so I couldn't get a decent purchase on it to exert a bit of brute force. On that occasion I had to phone the RAC to get them to help. It took the two of us a long time to get the bolt to move, but once I'd moved it the first little bit, the rest was easy. Having got it off, the first thing I did was to go over the whole of the thread with sandpaper and then liberally grease it to lubricate it and to repel water that splashes up. And I check that every time I check the spare tyre pressure (by definition - I have to remove the wheel to get at the valve!) so hopefully it will not get into that state again.

Reply to
Mortimer

I would never buy a vehicle that doesn't have a proper place for a regular size spare wheel and tire. I think someone in this newsgroup once said some new cars don't come with a spare wheel and tire at all. cuhulin

Reply to
cuhulin

More than a few of them don't have room for a spare tire. There are also a bunch of vehicles come with donut spares. For a bunch of years full size spares have been extra cost option items.

Reply to
Steve W.

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