New Tire Replacement Question

cbp0202 said:

Hi everyone, I'm super glad to join this awesome community. My first post is unfortunately a question about a situation with my brand new tires on a CPO 2019 CRV LX AWD. So a few days ago my tire front tire picked up a nail in in the tread area and it hadn't been leaking at all. So I ended up dropping my car off at a local tire/mech shop to get the wheel patched and plugged. After I got my car back I decided to inspect the work and the shop ended up plugging the tire to which the shop insisted it was fine. From quite a bit of reading on the internet I realized that plugging a tire is not the correct way of repairing the tire. I also learned that many shops will not correctly patch a tire after it has been plugged. So now I am in this dilemma where I have a brand new tire with 2,500 miles on it that I may have to end up replacing after I get a second opinion from a few local shops. Now my question is, can I replace one tire and call it a day? Of course it will be the same brand and model but I heard that an OEM tire is not the same as an aftermarket tire and therefore it will not wear the same. Is this true? I have a Bridgestone ecopia tire that the dealer installed when making it certified pre owned. Can I replace this with the same bridgestone ecopia model from say Tirerack, Costco, or Amazon? I'm worried about damaging the AWD system in the long run if they wear differently. Thank you in advance for any help!

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The proper repair for a simple tread puncture is Plug + Patch, from the inside of the tire. did the shop do that, or just a plug? I ask because you the owner cannot verify a patch repair on the inside unless you actually observed the repair in progress.

The plug is to fill in the missing rubber where the puncture took place and is inserted from the inside of the tire, and has a small retainer lip on it, and the patch insures that the tire is fully sealed and safe to drive on for the remaining life of the tire. Both are glued in the repair process to form a permanent vulcanized rubber seal.

A plug is fine as a temp repair to get you to a tire shop (I carry a set of plugs and tools to patch a simple puncture with the tire still on the vehicle, as well as 12v powered air inflator). But a permanent repair requires filling the hole from the reverse side with a plug and then bonding a repair patch over the inside surface where the plug is located. Tire shops will also grind the inside rubber surface a bit to help get it clean for permanent gluing.

If replacing a single tire, it must be the same brand, model, and size of tire or your AWD will go nuts, make noisy driving, and ultimately may fail under the stresses of mismatched tires. It also must be close to the rest of the tires in diameter, so generally you would only replace a single tire if it was still with good tread life matching the rest of the tires (~70% remaining tread is fine as is. If there is less tread on the other 3 tires than this, the best practice is to replace the pair of tires on the same axle, and insure they are always on the same axle when rotating tires periodically.

cbp0202 said:

I think they definitely just installed a plug since I can see the fibers and its orange in color. I called many nearby shops but they do not want to fix the plug repair since it has been repaired improperly in the first place. I thought too that I can go somewhere else to get it done again but all the shops nearby are saying no unfortunately.

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I have brought two different tires to Discount Tire that I temp plugged on the road to get me to the tire shop. They easily pulled my temp plug and then did the full and proper repair as I described above. Further.. tire repairs are free at DT, even if you did not buy tires from them.

But I get it.. a tire shop is a business, and they do not want to be held possibly liable for fixing a tire that someone else repaired poorly. But honestly reputable tire chains should have no issue with doing this type of repair. I also have heard some tire shops do not want to patch a tire that has had an inflator goo kit applied to it either to temp patch it to get it to a tire shop. This is just lazy on the part of the tire shops to refuse to do this.

And as others have noted... why agree to repair a tire if you can convince the owner they need a new tire? So I can see this as a practice with some tire shops that are more interested in revenue than whether the customer leaves the shop happy and fulfilled.