The Fixer: On Low Tire Pressure, Parenting, and Keeping One’s Cool
“Dad, I need help.”
This was the first thing I heard when I answered my phone a few weeks ago. It was my youngest daughter calling, speaking in a strained voice the four words that hit straight to the adrenal gland for a father. My ever-at-the-ready “Wheel of Mis-Fortune” started spinning and I mentally saw the categories flashing by: Pregnancy; Mugging; Emergency Room Visit; Car Wreck; Loss of Limb via Spontaneous Industrial Accident; Stranded Automobile; Rent Is Due; Mac Virus; Boyfriend Troubles; Roommate Troubles; Wardrobe Dilemma. I braced myself and asked what was wrong.
“I’m in a rental car headed to a photo shoot and one of the tires has a slow leak”. Bless you, my girl, I muttered to myself and we sprang into action to cure a relatively minor problem. No one is in the hospital, no one needs bail: a victory for any father.
The dashboard was flashing a tire-pressure warning. I am not a fan of the current nanny state that our cars have taken on. However, in this one instance, I was glad that GM had provided an onboard tire-pressure monitoring system, since it was my daughter in a strange car, after all.
She’d pulled off of the highway somewhere in New York State heading west. I asked her to scroll through the informative 2023 Chevy’s instrument panel to get to the tire-pressure screen. She told me that the right front tire was at 22 psi while all the others were at 32.
“You’re safe to drive to the next exit and find a gas station with an air pump,” were my first instructions. And so the dance began. After filling up (to 35 psi, for a little margin), she called back 15 minutes later to tell me that the pressure was going down 2 psi every five minutes. So, this had become a problem we needed to address. Her route was taking her across a few state lines, so we needed a semi-permanent fix. She had a deadline to meet for a photographic shoot, which meant calling the rental car company for service was not an option.
Two more gas station air pump stops were needed on the route to the nearest auto-ish parts store, which in this case was a Walmart in Pennsylvania. I texted her a shopping list of what she would need to travel the remaining 200 miles on a questionable tire, and her scavenger hunt amongst the four acres of merchandise available behind the big blue sign began. I had her send me a photo of the shelves of each area and guided her through her “picking list”. A Facetime call and her doing her best Vanna White hand gesturing cleared up any lingering confusion.
The list was comprised of a) diagnostic equipment; b) repair options; and c) last-ditch solutions. For the diagnosis part, I had her pick up a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex (generic substitutions allowed). This would give her something to spray on the tire to try to identify the leak spot in case a repair was needed, and to ascertain how large of a hole we were dealing with, as well as its location (in the tread, as-in “repairable”, or on the sidewall, as-in “terminal”).
For the side-of-the-road repair, I had her get four cans of tire goop such as Fix-a-Flat (or whatever was on sale) and a tire plug kit complete with insertion handle and rubber cement. The last item, which could be returned if not needed, was a cigarette lighter–powered air compressor so that she could become untethered from gas stations for an air supply. The analogy of an electric car having limiting “refilling” options was not lost on me—finding an air pump these days is difficult (every Lowe’s store has one, by the way, with free air). With all of this equipment, my confidence grew that my daughter was not going to be left stranded on the side of the road, far away from my helping hands. Heck, I have driven years on slowly leaking tires, so how bad could this be?
The ultimate medevac solution would be a call to the rental company’s tow truck, but this would be an admission of failure in my family system. We have obsessive tenacity in some situations, often to the frustration of others. A Dad-ism that I passed down is to be “relentless toward your goals,” delivered to multiple eye-rolls around the dinner table over the years, because I usually was talking about a papier-mâché volcano due at a middle school science fair in three days or some such. . . .
Equipped with $60 worth of weaponry, she attacked the problem. Being daughters of an engineer, all my girls are very handy with tools and tire irons, so our collective confidence was high. Each of them know how to change a flat tire, check their oil, and drive a manual transmission. Fixing a leaky tire was not going to be a problem. The tenacity gene today was going to be applied to getting to a professional photo shoot in time. Being an adapted New Yorker, my daughter’s agitation level was still low (life in the Big City makes you adaptable to disappointment. The secret to happiness? Lowered expectations). The Windex exercise did not reveal any one particular hole to be fixed, so “we” shot in one can of goop, inflated to 35 psi and set out toward the event. One data point that was discouraging: The inflation pressure reading on the dash did not rise appreciably during the goop-injection procedure. Maybe the can was a dud, or there was a user error in its application. She did not call for 20 minutes, so I was emboldened by her resourcefulness. Then the phone rang.
“It held for a while, then started leaking again at the 2 psi per five minutes rate,” came the report. I instructed her to pull over and put in the second can of tire inflation goop and inflate to 40 psi. I was aware of the calculus of having a higher pressure differential between the 40 psi in the tire and the 0 psi (gauge) in the atmosphere, and how that may cause the tire to leak faster, albeit momentarily, but I took the gamble on getting a bit more range and hoping the goop would fill the gap, as it were, along the way. I was more encouraged by her observation that the second can had made a positive gain in the baseline tire pressure, so maybe we were on to something.
Thirty minutes later the inevitable call came in. “We are leaking back at the same rate,” she said. With no visible hole to plug, and her making poor progress, I abandoned the idea of her using her newly acquired air compressor to limp to the photo shoot via a series of self-inflations, since it would make her miss her deadline. I asked her where the nearest airport or large town was, and she replied that Google Maps said Harrisburg International Airport was less than 30 minutes away (bless our modern smart phones, as this would have been an entirely different story in 1980). I told her to put in the third can of goop, top off the tire to 45 psi with her compressor, and to head for the airport where she could switch-out rental cars. With more goop in the tire, she set off. A cell call along the way reserved her replacement car, and her version of the Pony Express was under way.
Ten minutes into this leg of the trip, my phone rang again. “The car is shaking like crazy, and the steering wheel is hard to hold on to,” she reported. I make a mental note that three cans of tire goop are too many and told her to keep it under 60 mph and just suffer her way to the airport rental car lot as best she could. She proceeded, in a Churchillian fashion, and never, never gave in.
I am happy to report that she made it safely through this final leg of her saga, switched rental cars, and arrived at the photo shoot only a little behind schedule. To her great credit, she did not once raise her voice or blood pressure, she just took it as another set of problems to be fixed. The life lesson here? Obstacles are just opportunities to invoke some resourcefulness and cleverness. Everyone faces challenges; it is how you respond that determines the quality of your life.
I guess growing up around broken British sports cars rubbed off on her in a very good way. . . .
Having had two daughters that often set out on road trips, I could certainly relate to this story. I’ve waited on – and received – those calls more than a few times. I applaud both the author’s and the daughter’s inginuity and perseverance. Also glad it all worked out – but I hope the daughter learned to pack a few roadside repair essentials before embarking on the next multi-state excursion 😜
I guess I don’t want to be sexist about this: I’ve had similar calls from sons as well as the girls!
My son called and said he had a tire down at school. I load up the floor hack and compressor and the impact.
I get there and the side of the tire was torn. He clipped a sharp curb and toasted the tire. I asked did you hit something and he told me were. It was several miles away. I asked if the light was on he said yes and kept going. Some how it did not hurt the wheel and the tire was trash any ways.
We had a good discussion on what the light means and not to continue driving if the light comes on and zero pressure is showing.
He needed more garage time, Daddy tried!
Being a child of the Baby Boom, when I first became interested in cars and trucks ( the real ones … not toys) I was about nine or ten years old. In those days your car or truck came with a REAL spare tire… and of course a REAL Jack and a REAL lug wrench. Then about thirty years ago… somebody in the auto industry “ invented “ the spare donut tire… not a real tire but enough to get you to a tire shop or a tire repair place. Then about fifteen years ago I discovered while shopping for a petite auto that some came with no spare at all. What? The car dealer advised that most drivers don’t know how to change a tire and most drivers will rely on road service to fix a flat. So I guess…. Changing a tire is old school. All you need is a cell phone and a credit card… and you’ll be fine. Times have changed
Good points all. Which leads to my dilemma, a 2004 Porsche Boxster. The last year Porsche included a spare tire. A donut.
It’s now 20 years old. I used it once in west Texas and it saved my ass when a rear tire blew out a sidewall and I couldn’t just plug and fill.
Porsche no longer sells these spare tires. And NOBODY makes one in the OEM size.
Only option for replacement is a size “close enough” to original.
The tire still looks good. And it states covered in the frunk, so no UV degradation. But, I have used it, for about 100 miles, and it IS twenty years old.
Hmmm…..
A problem I had not considered! I don’t have any vehicles with donuts, but I’m sure to run into someone someday who will present that question. Let us know the answer, John!
The spare in my Supra lasted 26 years and then it popped sitting in the car. I was able to buy the same size tire but instead of the Bridgestone that came with the car it is now a Yokohama. Not a lot of spare tires in my size.
A couple years ago the daughter’s college car (1998 Oldsmobile) blew out the sidewall of the unused 1998 vintage donut sitting in the well in the trunk. For me yours is getting to the age where close enough is better than hope it holds air.
I’ve gotten that call before from my daughter, now a junior in college. ’06 CR-V; VSA light, ABS light, CEL, runs awful (but runs), on her way back to school sunday night, and almost there. Limped it home the following weekend so I could replace a couple of VTEC screens that I suspected debris clogging were the cause of the problem (210,000 miles on it).
The spare is a full-size, but has the plastic HONDA logo-ed cover with with a rusted solid zipper holding it on. Any flat change will require a box cutter to slice through the fabric that the zipper is sewn to to remove cover. I suppose a AAA membership is prudent insurance for the next couple of years…
My wife called me one day and said she had a flat and she was 10 miles from the nearest repair shop. I knew her car had the OEM can of fix a flat so I went through the process of using it. After I finished she said she knew how to do it and that was exactly what she had done when she used it on her friend Jenny’s car. Guess who drove to her, removed the tire, carried it to the repair shop, drove back to her car and reinstalled it.
You mentioned that all your daughters know how to change a tire — so why didn’t she?
Not one, nor two, but THREE cans of “fix-a-flat”?!
That’s just begging for trouble.
You don’t mention the cause of the car shaking… it was the two pounds or so of coagulating rubber-stuff doing its centrifugal, gravity-orbit-pull on that wheel. You’d need something from Joe Weider to balance it now.
Very possible that the rental car was without a spare tire or jack, given the sad fact that new cars seldom come with them. The young lady certainly would have installed the spare or had it installed at one of her many gas station stops just to end the continual aggravation.
I had the same question as “audiobycarmine.” Why didn’t he instruct her to put the spare tire on? If the car didn’t have one (can’t think of a 2023 Chevy model typically found in rental fleets that didn’t come with a spare), I would have expected the author to clarify why the obvious solution was not chosen.
Good question. She was on a tight deadline and needed to keep a 75 mph pace. I’d rather have her doing that speed on a leaky full size tire than knowingly put her on a donut tire and hold to the lower safe speed limit of a temporary spare.
Many, many years ago (like 50+) my wife called me at work to tell me that both tires were flat on the right side on our, then new, 1970 Camaro. Our baby girl was crying in her baby seat and, while my wife was trying to put her pacifier in her mouth, she hit a curb and, not only flattened the tires, but bent both rims.
The Camaro spare would work on one end. Borrowing a spare from my boss’s Chevelle provided the other wheel and tire. Fortunately, nothing else was hit and no one was injured. It could have been a lot worse. She learned a lesson that day…stop the car before you tend to the baby.
This story and all of the replies sure makes for some interesting reading. Been there and done that on most all of them. Flat tires, dead batteries, popped hoses, thrown fan belts, etc, are not fun, and they all seem to happen at the most inopportune times (after stores/shops are closed, etc).
One better would be a son in this situation in a rental car and continued to drive until tire was destroyed. Mine did.
A co-worker hit a curb a few blocks away, and flattened two tires on his dad’s early-1970’s Impala. He put the spare on one, and borrowed the spare from my 1968 Buick for the other wheel. Then he came walking back again, and said my spare would not work; it “just would not fit”. I did not understand why; both were 15″ GM’s. It was not until later that I learned about bolt circles!
Many years ago my younger son, about 25 at the time, moved from NC to Flagstaff in a fairly new Solara that he was making payments on. Owed about 8k. He met up with a girl from Phoenix and drove back and forth every weekend. It’s a hard uphill trip on I-17…. I had a visit planned. He called the day before I was to arrive and said the car was “dead” in the middle of nowhere. I made arrangements for a roll-back to haul them up to Flag. I called a reputable shop and set everything up.
When I arrived the next day I went to the shop. The mechanic looked at me with a rather sad look. He said “come look at this”….. not a thing you want to hear. He pulled out the dipstick. Pitch black and bone dry. He said that when he pulled the drain plug absolutely nothing came out. Nearly brand new car with a seized engine and a mortgage on it. I (we) bit the bullet and got a good engine from a rear end totaled Toyota. But even that ended up around 4k with labor. I asked my lugnut son when he had last changed or check the oil- “never, i didn’t know i needed to”…. UURRGGHH.
I learned through experience with changing bicycle tires in my youth and currenly that the first thing to do with a suspected tire leak is to rub spit on the tire valve ( for this generation take the valve cap off first). I keep a tire valve tool and replacement valve inserts in every vehicle. Saved my butt several times in 50 years.
I’m not understanding what went down here. Every vehicle I’ve had that didn’t come with a spare tire came with a compressor and goo. (The cars were not equipped with runflats) They even have gauges on the compressor. That reminds me that it is time to order up some new canisters of goo as they do have an expiration date and the car my MIL drives has been displaying the time to replace the goo message.