tyre-d out

Right then, so this tyre/pothole situation.

To summarise what I've posted - Monday on the way home from work I hit a pothole REALLY hard. Continued home, but failed to check the tyre that evening, because I'm stupid. Tuesday I drove in, I now realise with the tyre deflating. By the time I got to work the tyre was totally dead.

My plan was to hope for the best - assume it was just a knackered tyre, get it off at lunchtime, go down kwik-fit and start the ball rolling on getting new one.

The first problem was that I could not get the tyre off. There are four nuts that you need to unscrew and I could do three of them, but the fourth was one of these locking wheel nuts. The idea seems to be that there's a kind of "key" that fits onto the nut and clips into your wrench, but for the life of me I just could not get any purchase to turn it.

Luckily, I'm a member of the RAC, so I called them up. I called them at about 1:30pm and they said it would probably not be until 4pm that someone would get to me. Fine - I was at work, I wasn't going anywhere any way.

However, because I knew my tyres are rather rare, I thought I'd call kwik fit and try to get the ball rolling. So I did that, explain the tyre size and stuff and that all 4 of my current tyres are continentals. The guy said they'd need to check the stocks and get back to me.

So, 4pm rolled around and no sign of the RAC. I phoned them up, chasing, and they said it was going to be 6pm before someone could get to me! I appreciate I'm not pregnant and stuck by the side of the motorway, but come on - that's just taking the piss. 4 and a half hours to get to me!

Next thing, I hadn't heard anything from kwik fit, so I called them up. Well, it turns out that there are no Continental tyres in my size in the entire country! Not even Continental themselves have got any in stock!

Well, I know that you're not supposed to mix tread patterns on your driving wheels, which are the ones with power going to them. In my case that's the fronts and it was the front left that was knackered. However, the guy said we could order another brand - Pirelli in this case - and swap one from the back to the front.

The RAC guy eventually turned up at 5:45pm and of course he had the tyre off and changed in less than 5 minutes!

Unfortunately, I've got one of these shitty space saver tyres. That means I can't go above 50, and in reality I've been driving everywhere at 40, because it's far too easy to go above and if I was at 50 and did that, Christ knows what would happen.

Anyway, got home and decided I'd tidy up so that my tyre was in easy reach for the next day and I'd put all the bits and pieces for changing the tyre away too.

Well, while I was doing that, I noticed that the inside of the wheel - the inner rim - looked a bit funny. Using a tape measure, I was able to determine that the wheel is actually bent! There's a part of it that isn't as round as it should be! I'm guessing that's actually why the tyre deflated - I certainly couldn't see any holes in it.

But that also means I can't just put a new tyre on it - it needs properly fixing. I therefore investigated this on the internet that night and a guy I e-mailed called me right back.

He said it was going to be about £75 to repair, which isn't cheap, but is a lot cheaper than a new wheel. He also said it was going to take a couple of days (there are loads and loads of people hitting potholes and bending alloys because the roads have been fucked up by the recent bad weather)and he'd pick it up on Thursday.

So I've been driving on this crappy space saver in the meant time and it's not fun I can tell you.

And guess what? Thursday rolls around and there's not a peep from this guy at all. I phoned him up towards the end of the day and it just went straight to voicemail. So I e-mailed him late last night and I've not had a reply yet - to be honest, that's kind of fair enough, because it was late, but it also means he's still not answered my phone message.

It's getting silly - he also said it would take about 48 hours to repair, because of the backlog, so that means it'll be ages before it's done. I therefore phoned the Nissan garage this morning and asked how much a new alloy would be. It's more expensive - £180 - but he said I could have it tomorrow if I ordered by 11am (not sure this would actually be the case, but even if it was Monday, that'd be quicker).

The way I'm currently feeling about the situation I'll probably actually do both. That way I might be able to have an actual proper spare tyre, rather than this space saver shit.