Plugging a Tire

If you have a classic car and you're actually gonna drive it sooner or later, you're gonna get something in your tires. You know, it's just a fact of life. But the problem comes in where, you know, classic car tires aren't usually available at every corner gas station or even tire store. So, you know, it's important to, you know, even if it's just to get you off the road or off the freeway, knowing how to plug a tire can, you know, save you a bunch of hassle later on. You know, it wasn't so long ago I had even a car on a car trailer and, uh, suddenly I had a tire go down and, you know, because it was a unique size tire and rim and for whatever reason, uh, the spare tire wasn't loaded in the trailer, but, uh, we did have a tire plug kit handy. We were able to take the tire off, plug it, take it up to the gas station, fill it up and get that back on the trailer and get back on the road. So this is a good skill to add to your arsenal of skills to keep your classic car going. And, uh, in this car we've picked up, normally you can do this with the, with the tire still on the rim and we've picked up a screw and it actually worn off the top of it at this point. First thing you gotta do is get that out of the tire. And, uh, as you can see, it's a look like an old self tapper. It's got a few miles on it. So it was in there for a while before the tire actually started going down. And a tire plug kit, you know, really contains just a few, you know, it contains a, a hook to actually put the plug in a reamer to get the hole a little bigger, you know, a little bit of, you know, some will include some rubber cement with them. You know, if you want rubber cement that keeps that plug from popping in and out, not 100% necessary if you just need to get it plugged to get, you know, off the road, those are the kind of things you're gonna need. And what you wanna do is you wanna make sure you ream out that hole where the puncture was mainly because that hole is. So, you know, if it's just a nail, it'll, it'll wanna try to seal itself up, but there's not enough room in there to actually drive a new plug in there. So you wanna uh grab your Reamer and actually work it in and out. You wanna work it good because you want to get a good hole in there for the plug and it seems kind of aggressive but it, it's what you gotta do to actually create a, a bigger hole in there. Next, what we're gonna use is it's almost like a needle kind of thing. It will actually thread now into this hole to end with the plug on it to, uh, actually fill the void that we have there. And tire plugs come, there's either black or these are the tans. Um, they're all, you know, I've never found a, a big difference between, uh, the color of plug and you kind of fish this thing through here then for a little, you know what also helps a little bit. It works to, um, lubricate the way in as well as seal it. Once it's done, you put a little, uh, rubber cement on this plug and I really got to work this in and if it, if it's going too hard, you know, don't be afraid to stop ream your hole a little bit more. So now you can see we've got the plug, uh, into the tire, we've got the ceiling on it. We've got the plug in place and now we can go ahead and reinflate the tire, it'll hold us air and get us back to, you know, get us home or get us to a shop where we can get it, you know, properly patched then.