Rim Leak

I go to a near by gas station and fill my almost flat tire up. 32 miles later I arrive at the tire place where I bought the tires for my 2000 Rave4. A half hour later they tell me I have a rim leak. A rim leak? I've never heard of such a thing. The guy shows me where on the rim the small leak is coming from and tells me I will have to order a new rim from Toyota. $136.00 dollars later and the rim will be in at Toyota in two days. I'm told 15 bucks to install the new rim to the older tire. I've never heard of this rim leak thing. Both places the tire company where I bought the tires as well as the Toyota parts department told me this does happen quite often. I've been driving for some 38 years now and have never had this happen. My rims are factory rims by the way.

That happens occasionally, also you should set your line length to 65 (or so) and your word wrap off. It'll make your posts much easier to read for anyone who uses these settings (most of us).

Your whole post appears as one long line to me (all 860 characters of it!)

FYI, contrary to popular practice, a "rim" is not a synonym for a wheel. The rim is the outer circumference of the wheel where the tire bead seats. I've encountered porous wheels before. If the wheel is not physically damaged, the leak can be fixed a number of ways. The easiest is to use one of the commercial tire stop leak products like the green slimy stuff, although it results in a mess for the next person to demount the tire. The next easiest is to have the shop coat the inside of the wheel with a generous coating of bead sealer, a black tar-like substance. This is the method I've used in the past. The most permanent fix is to send the wheel to a shop that specializes in wheel repair to refinish the inside of the wheel or to a body shop to apply a coat of clear coat to the inside of the wheel.

I go to a near by gas station and fill my almost flat tire up. 32 miles later I arrive at the tire place where I bought the tires for my 2000 Rave4. A half hour later they tell me I have a rim leak. A rim leak? I've never heard of such a thing. The guy shows me where on the rim the small leak is coming from and tells me I will have to order a new rim from Toyota. $136.00 dollars later and the rim will be in at Toyota in two days. I'm told 15 bucks to install the new rim to the older tire. I've never heard of this rim leak thing. Both places the tire company where I bought the tires as well as the Toyota parts department told me this does happen quite often. I've been driving for some 38 years now and have never had this happen. My rims are factory rims by the way.

As an aside, guy: Usenet News is, and was designed from the inception as, a plain-text medium first and foremost. It dates back to the days when you had a 110-baud modem at home, not a 2 Megabit DSL connection. The less overhead wasted, the better.

We don't need to use "Franklin Gothic Medium" font to read a simple question about automobiles - the default desktop font works fine for most people. (I didn't go looking for text and background colors or "blink" tags, but some people have really bad taste and make the text psychedelic - Gamma Green letters on a Gamma Red background that will melt your eyeballs...)

This isn't a webpage. (Although if you read through Google Groups they may have ported it into one - But it didn't start that way.) Please turn off the HTML, and turn on the word wrap. And a paragraph break once in a while would be nice too, while you're at it.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. ;-P

Now then, back to the subject at hand...

Rim leaks can happen with cast aluminum wheels - you get a few air bubbles or some slag (dirt, sand, oxidized aluminum, misc. cruft) in the molten aluminum during the casting process. It might not be visible in the raw casting. And if it goes all the way from the finished machined inner surface to the finished machined outer surface you end up with a leak.

And it might test as holding air fine at the wheel factory, then over time some water gets in, or it gets hot and the crud melts and dissolves out of the channel, or a little corrosion eats through the final layer, and the leak opens up after a delay.

Of course, the other potential cause of a rim leak is smacking into a curb or hitting a nasty pothole, and the leak is the first sign of a structural crack developing in the wheel - you have to check for that. It's really REALLY bad when a wheel comes apart at speed, it can cause some serious driving excitement...

At $136 you are getting off easy. I've heard of factory rims running $300, $400, and more each. But don't throw away the wheel that leaks quite yet.

I've seen simple porous spots fixed by putting a thin layer of epoxy or polyester (fiberglass) resin on the inside of the wheel to seal the leak. Mark the leaky spot on the outside of the rim, scuff an area on the inside clean with a coarse Stainless Steel wire brush to get a clean surface so the resin sticks, and make a 'patch' coating of resin on the inside where you think the leak starts.

If you can see the exact spot on the inside where the leak starts, you might be able to find an expert welder in your area to fix it. 30 seconds with a TIG welder, one little puddle of weld metal to fill in the hole, and it's all better permanently.

But too big a weld puddle might affect the wheel structurally, so it needs to be done with delicacy. With aluminum, it's a VERY small temperature rise between the small molten surface puddle you want and where you melt a big hole straight through (oops!) so the welder needs to carefully control the heat input. Some cast aluminum alloys need to be pre-heated before welding to avoid forming cracks - they put the wheel in a calibrated oven at 400F to 600F to warm it up.

The welding shop probably has the dye penetrant crack testing kit or the Magnaflux® system needed to look for those potential structural cracks I mentioned earlier.

And if all else fails and you can't stop the leak (but the rim has been inspected and deemed structurally sound) they do make inner tubes designed for use with Radial tires, and you can use that rim as the spare. The radial tubes have a red valve stem for easy positive identification.

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Wheels can and do leak on occasion. Structurally sound steel wheels can be welded. Structurally sound alloy wheels are routinely and easily repaired by 'peaning' any small holes, on the inside. Take your vehicle to competent wheel shop, WBMA

mike hunt

Bruce L. Bergman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Bruce, you a SoCal boy, dat fo' sho'. Rust? Corrosion? Bah, never heard o' dem!

The primary cause of rim leaks is corrosion. Porosity is WAY at the back of the bus.

The cure for 99% of rim leaks is 80-grit sandpaper. You dismount the tire, put the wheel on the balancer, then spin it while applying sandpaper to the rims. A bit of sealer when reseating the tire and you're done for years. Damn sight cheaper than refinishing the wheel.

What the OP needs to do is find a tire shop not staffed (or managed) by stupes.