Simon Says

by Simon Hastelow

Three wheels on my wagon For the third time in my vehicle driving life I have had a serious issue with wheels and tyres. None of which were my fault, but all serve as a reminder that you shouldn’t just trust someone else has done their job.

First one was following an MOT. I had a cracked side-wall so the garage swapped over my spare tyre to get the ‘PASS’. Obviously this was back in the days when they’d do things like that for you rather than the current ‘computer-says-no’ experience we have to deal with.

Anyway, driving home I felt like I’d hit a pot-hole in the road, but was then overtaken by a wheel. The nuts hadn’t been tightened up correctly and I lost it. A post office van some distance up the road acted as an involuntary fielder and stopped it for me. I jacked up the vehicle (Defender 110), put the wheel back on using some spare wheel nuts I had and carried on home. Other than a slight flat spot on my brake disk there was no other damage.

Some years later, and on another Defender 110, I had the suspension upgraded. Full kit, springs, shocks, braided brake hoses, new bushes, the works. The company also fitted wheel spacers. However, the guy fitting them only torqued the wheelnuts, not the nuts holding the spacers!

Cue my second experience of losing a bloody wheel while driving along!

I know some of you will say that “You must have heard something, or felt something was wrong!”, but I didn’t, both instances were sudden and about as dramatic as you can get.

Once I got that wheel back on and got to a safe spot I removed all four wheels - one other wheel had loose nuts - and binned the spacers. I have never used spacers since.

Which brings me to my most recent escapade, with our family bus. As the MOT was getting closer, and last year there was an advisory notice about excessive play in the steering, I decided to get it fixed pre-MOT. Two tyres were also nearing the end of their useful life, and another had a slow leak so I asked the garage to fit four new tyres.

When I picked it up they told me there was no point changing one of them as it still had good tread. I paid the bill and toddled off to book the service and MOT at a different garage.

We have a running joke about our bus, a 2005 Renault Grand Espace that has travelled almost 150,000 miles, that if it fails its MOT we’ll get rid of it. Every year it passes or only fails on something trivial. So for the past six years it has served us well while being used and abused as a people carrier, furniture mover and general duties for taking all kinds of stuff to the tip. However, this year I got the news that “Your car has failed its MOT”.

Fearing the worst, and with visions of spending hours on AutoTrader to find a replacement, I was rather confused when I was told it had the wrong tyres on. The MOT guy said “It has an odd tyre on the back which is a different size to the others.” It took me a few minutes to realise that the ‘odd tyre’ was, in fact, the only correct tyre on the car. It was the other three which were wrong, the ones which had recently been changed.

After quickly checking the receipt to make sure I wasn’t going mad I took it back to the tyre-shop to tell them that they had fitted 215 tyres instead of 225. At a quick glance you wouldn’t even notice, but looking at them properly there’s quite a marked difference. The 36mm (1.5”) difference in overall circumference is tiny and only a 1.5% reduction, but the reduced width is striking and I’m glad it was picked up fairly soon after the mistake was made.

Thankfully they apologised profusely and swapped them all immediately for me to get it back to the MOT station for the coveted ‘Pass’.

So that’s three times I have just trusted, or assumed, that people have done their jobs properly. No real harm was done in each case, but it could have been very different if I’d been going any faster in the wheel-loss episodes, not just for me and my cars but for people getting in the way of a rampant run away wheel!

I do realise that this is mostly a result of me going soft in my old age and paying other people to look after my cars rather than doing it myself, but even if I did my own servicing I’d still probably go elsewhere to get wheels and tyres fitted.

Let this serve as a reminder to do those regular maintenance checks we all say we do, but rarely complete - water, oil, tyres, wheelnuts, lights and brake fluid. It might just avoid a disaster.

Keeping all four wheels on the floor is always best!