My son came in after mowing the lawn saying “Dad we have a problem”. He proceeded to explain how he was having problems steering and when he pulled it into the garage he noticed that one of the back tires was flat.
We found a nail in the tire and rather than take it someplace I pulled out the plug kit. I took advantage of this to teach my son how to plug a tire, and he did it all. If it fails he will have to walk home, from the front yard 🙂 If you look at the picture above you will see the little bit of the orange plug sticking out.
Frequently you can plug a tire without even taking it off the car, mower or whatever else. This can be a real advantage if you are out away from your home base. Consider being on the side of the road or pulled into a gas station. If you catch it before too much air escapes, and you are quick you can have the tire plugged before it even goes flat. Jacking a car up on the side of a busy road can be dangerous, you either have the jack in the soft shoulder or it is on the road side and you have to worry about a car hitting you. Instead you can just pop a plug in. However I must admit to not carrying a plug kit in my car so I decided to get this compact kit from Amazon.
You will likely need to add air to the tire so it is goo to also have a portable air compressor. My Chevy mini-van with the load leveling system comes with a built-in air compressor to adjust the suspension and it has a port on it you can use for adding air to your tires. It has save me on more than one occasion.
I’ve used up everything in my existing plug kit that I keep in the garage so I also ordered a 50 pack of plugs, this should last me almost forever. Note this type of repair is only for tubeless tires, which will be almost any car, but things like lawn mowers, tractors and wheelbarrows might have tubes. Bicycles almost always have tubes.
