Tire problem

Hi,

I just had a new exprience with a tire on my GMC truck. About two weeks ago, I came home from a larger town about 30 miles away. When I pulled in my driveway and got out, one of my rear tires was about half way flat.

I used one of those liquid inflators to air it back up and headed to Wal Mart which was still open. They removed the tire and tested it and could not find a leak. They said nothing was wrong with it.

One week later, the tire was almost flat again while the truck was in my garage overnight. I aired it back up with my air compuressor and took it to a local filing station that does all my work on my vehicles. They were about an hour or so from being able to work on it, so I left and told them I would return later.

On the way back home while trying to kill some time, I found a tire store that has been in business for about forty years in this town. I had always heard they were a little crooked, but since my father had owned and operated a BF Goodrich tire store for years, so I knew enough about tires not to get ripped off, so I stopped and asked if they could fix it.

As the story goes, they moved it on to the rack and removed the tire (as I carefully observed from a distance outside the bay). Pretty soon, the tech who took it off went in to the office and here came the slick dressed up service person out to me. He said, I have marked the tire for you, but that tire has a nail in it and is unfixable. I just glanced at it and it looked like a little nail head on the outside of the tire, but still in the part that went on the road.

He said that I have a video I want you to watch to show you how dangerous that tire is and therefore we can't fix it. Immediately, I told him if this was about buying tires, he was wasting his time, I was not interested. He persisted that I needed new tires and at that time, I was not very nice, but informed him to get that tire back on my vehicle and I would get it fixed elsewhere.

He begged me to just look at his video and some pictures he had, but I became a little hostile and insisted they put it back immediately. They complied. As I was about to leave, he recognized my name and asked if my father was the man who ran the tire store years before, and when I informed him so and told him I worked in that store while growning up and knew quite a bit about tires, he turned a slight ried color as he suddenly realized that I knew more than he thought.

When I left the store with an unfixed tire, I stopped at a nearby park and got out to look at the "nail" they had marked as the problem area on the tire. With my pockeknife, I flipped out a little stone that looked like a nail head...there was no nail there where they had marked that tire, but there was a little stone that looked like a nail head.

By that time, the original place was open where I normally get my tire done, so I went over to get it evaluated. They removed it and found out that there was an animal bone (I had run over road kill about a week earlier when a semi was taking more than his lane) in the middle of the tire and since it was pliable, it leaked very slowly. I saw the bone and it was a pretty darn big piece of bone. The person who worked on it told me it was the second bone he had found in a tire this week while fixing them as part of his job.

Anyway, they buffed it from the inside, put a patch on it and it hasn't leaked an ounce of air since. They confirmed there was not and had not been any nail in that tire.

Animal bones (road kill) as puncturing tires is new to me, so wondered if anyone else has ever seen this in a tire problem? I did see the bone embedded in there, so know that was the issue.
 

Autoseller

New Member
Ok let’s tackle the gauges. The tach is the easiest to check, buy or borrow another tach and hook it up and see where your truck idles at, and compare that to your tach. If the numbers don't match then try to source a REMAN tach for that year V-8 truck.
 
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