The usual morning run, cruising down the Queen Kaʻahumanu highway to Kona and work. Running chill, with the tunes on and a beautiful day for a drive.
The polite but also very rude chime of the tire pressure alarm annouces a bit of trouble.
The tire pressure is down into worrisome territory and dropping lower as I watch. I pull over and confirm, the rear passenger side tire is indeed losing pressure. Closer to home than work I turn around and limp back to the house.
At the house I have a nice concrete driveway and a floor jack that makes removing the tire easy and so much safer than on the side of the road. As the tire comes off the cause of the flat is quite obvious, a two inch machine screw right through the tread.
The issue is in the location of the puncture, near enough to the shoulder of the tire that many tire shops will refuse to repair it (another thanks to the lawyers in our litigious society) and insist on condemning the tire. I also know from experience that shops will not sell me one tire, they insist on replacing the whole set, particularly on a 4WD… Really?
I look at it twice, this is a clean puncture through the thick part of the tread… This is an easy repair.
Another advantage of a 4WD vehicle, the Compass Trailhawk edition in this case, is that the vehicle comes with a full duty spare, I can drive around for the day and not worry about driving on one of those plastic donuts that many vehicles call a spare tire. Off to work I go, just a wee bit late.
A sixteen dollar stop by the auto parts place on the way home and a half hour of pushing tools through rubber gives me a good permanent repair. I think about those who do not have the skills to deal with this sort of thing, a simple screw in the tread could so easily turn into a thousand dollars of loss. The reason I teach these skills to all who come.
Just dealing with life’s little troubles.
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