Death of a Tire

I was driving to one of my classes tonight and my car seemed to have trouble turning on some of the corners. I wasn’t sure if I was just being paranoid or if one of my tires was flat. I figured I could get to the Park-and-Ride just before the freeway and take a look at my tires. I backed into a spot and started to walk around my car. When I got to the back passenger tire, it was obviously flat.

I opened up the trunk of my car to get to the spare and was met with all the junk that i’ve had piled in there from a few weeks earlier. After I put everything inside the car I got the spare out and then the jack. As I started to place the jack and bring the car up, I realized that I had the car on a slight hill. I found a couple of broken chunks of asphalt or concrete and put them in front of the front tires so it would start rolling away on my while I worked on the back end.

I was working for about twenty minutes when my phone tells me through my bluetooth headset that my English class was starting. I figured by this point that there was no reason to go to my class tonight since I would probably get there very near the end of class. I would also have to take the back way, and I’d rather spend as little time driving on this tiny tire as possible.

When I got home, my dad and I tried to find out what made it go flat. I had already rolled the tire a couple times after I took it off to try to find a nail or something, but with no luck. As my dad got out his compressor so we could fill it up to find the leak, I found out that the inner side-wall had a hole in it, probably from me driving on it for about four miles.

We checked the pressure of the spare and the other tires and then realized that the spare should be about 60 psi (when I checked it, the pressure was only at about 22). My dad doesn’t work on Thursdays, so he’s going to take it to a tire place and see if he can get some new tires ordered. Luckily this was a tire that I needed to replace anyway due to wear.