Can my tyre be repaired?
Three conditions decide it, and you can check all three yourself before you call. If your tyre passes, a repair is quicker and costs a fraction of a replacement. If it fails even one, the tyre is not safe to repair and no honest fitter will do it.
It has not been driven on while flat
This is the one people get wrong. Running even a few hundred metres on a flat grinds the inner liner against the rim and breaks the sidewall down from the inside. The outside can look untouched. We check the inside of every tyre before committing to a repair, and if the liner is chewed we say so rather than patch it and hope.
The puncture is in the tread, not the sidewall
The tread has steel belts behind it and can take a plug. The sidewall flexes with every rotation and carries the weight of the car, so a repair there fails eventually, usually at speed. Sidewall damage of any size means a new tyre, and shoulder damage right at the edge of the tread is treated the same way.
The hole is no larger than 6mm
Roughly a pencil width. A nail or a screw is almost always inside this. A gash from a kerb or a piece of steel usually is not. Above 6mm too many belt cords have been cut for a repair to hold pressure reliably.
If it cannot be repaired, you are not stuck
We ask for your tyre size on the phone for exactly this reason. The van arrives carrying a replacement in your size, so a call-out that starts as a repair can finish as a fitting without a second visit and without a tow. Every tyre we fit is balanced before it goes back on the car.
Find your tyre sizeHow tyre replacement worksWhat a repair does not fix
A plug seals a hole. It does not restore tread already worn below 1.6mm, and it does not correct the uneven wear a long slow leak causes. If we find the tyre is near the wear bars we will tell you, because you will be buying one within months anyway.
Describe it to us 1300 689 868