‘The area around the valve looked like a foam party’
Corroded rim leaves 125 deflated
Commuter bikes and corrosion often go hand in hand. While the young rider of this Piaggio Fly 125 could live with his steed looking tatty, he got tired of pumping up his rear tyre every day and so took it into Doncaster Motorcycles with what he thought was a slow puncture.
Mechanic Kev Hollingsworth picks up the story: “His tyre was close to the legal limit, which is when you get more punctures. But his deflated nature wasn’t a puncture, it was rim corrosion.”
When Kev removed the wheel, he laid it flat, cleaned it down with an airline and brushed the edge of each side of the rim and around the valve with a washing up liquid solution to see if any bubbles welled up. There were a few rim bubbles, but the valve area was a foam party, so once he’d removed the tyre he whipped out his Dremmel to clean up the valve hole and any other furry bits before fitting a new valve.
Kev added: “I never used to do any of these when I started out a couple of decades ago, but it’s quite common these days, so it’s worth making it one of your regular checks, especially if you’ve lost a few psi. In this case the valve core was air-tight; it was all down to the rim.
“We have to regularly drain accumulated water from our aircompressor tank and I wonder whether this corrosion crops up more because people use forecourt airlines which might not be maintained regularly, and the wheel internals get a build-up of internal condensation and corrosion.”
The bill came to £30, but if the tyre had lost much more air, things could have got messy.