Slow Leak in Your Tire How to Check Car Tires for Leaks and Punctures

In this video, I'm gonna show you how to determine why your tire is flat.

Before we do anything, you wanna take a look at the tire, look at the outside, see if there's any indication where you hit a curb or anything. See if there's anything in the tire where there's a slice in it. You can do that to the inside as well, just look all along the tire, I don't see anything. And then also in the tread, take a look at the tread. Now, you could do this while the tire is still on the car, you could raise the vehicle up a little bit and just spin the tire. And just look for any big nails or anything or any metal objects. And this looks good, I don't see anything.

Take the valve cap off and check the tire pressure. If it was flat, obviously, there's not gonna be a pressure in there, you wanna pump it up to the appropriate pressure. So, we got 35 in here. If you had a dunk tank with water in it, you could put it underwater and see if you can see any bubbles. Or if you had a kiddie pool, you could always throw it in there and just see. But one thing that will work even a little bit better than that is soapy water in a squirt bottle. So, you can just spray, we'll start around the valve stem, and it might suds up a little bit, let that sit. And then we're gonna go all the way around the rim of the tire. So, looking at the valve stem, I don't see any leaks, it's not foaming up anymore, and little bit of bubbles around the rim of the tire, those were there. These would be multiplying, you would see it sudsing up a little bit. I don't see anything leaking from this side. So, what we're gonna do is flip the tire over and do the same on the backside. After a couple minutes, this still looks good on this side. So, now we're gonna check the tread.

We sprayed the tread down and looking at it we didn't see anything. But we noticed when we looked at the front again after it had gone for a while that it was starting to bubble up right on the rim right there. So, our leak is extremely small in this case, and it's actually leaking between the rim and the wheel itself. The only way to fix this leak is to take the tire off the rim, clean up the rim, and reseal the tire. Any of the corrosion right here that's on the rim, this isn't really all that bad, but it wasn't leaking that bad either. That's gonna cause a leak. Over time the corrosion gets worse and worse and the gap is gonna get bigger and bigger and just make it worse. So, we're gonna clean that up, you can use the wire brush or even a grinder. Just be careful, you don't wanna grind too much material off. And then on the tire, you could take...if there's any corrosion just clean that up, you can use a light wire brush, just clean it up. This is all cleaned up now and the rim is all cleaned up. Now, if we had some bead sealer, what it is is like a rubbery paste that goes all along the rim or the mounting surface where the tire would mount to the rim. You'd wanna put that on, that's gonna seal the tire up better. We don't have that in our situation, so we're just gonna seal it up, use a little soapy water, and reinstall the tire.

Now I can recheck the tire with the soapy water and I should be good to go. Now, if you ended up having something in the tread, whether it be a nail or screw, you're gonna have to either plug it temporarily or patch it from the inside. In the event that you couldn't find anything wrong with the tire and you checked your other tires and they were all about the same level of pressure, they were all 5 or 10 pounds low, it could have been due to the cold weather. In cold weather, sometimes tires lose a little bit of air and you just have to top them off. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you subscribe to our channel, ring that bell, turn on all notifications so you don't miss any of our videos.