Nail in your tire in Denver

Leave it in. A nail sitting in the tread is acting as a plug, and a tire with a nail still in it often holds enough air to sit safely in the driveway for a day. Pull it out in the parking lot and you turn a slow leak into a flat.

Then book the visit. We come to where the car is, take the wheel off, get the tire off the rim and find out what is actually going on inside it.

Where the nail sits decides everything

The US Tire Manufacturers Association sets the standard, and every part of it matters here.

Tread area only. The crown of the tire, the part that touches the road. A nail in the shoulder or anywhere in the sidewall is not repairable. Not by us, not by anyone following the standard.

A quarter of an inch, maximum. That is the hole, not the nail head. A screw dragged sideways or a bolt makes a bigger wound than it looks.

The tire has to come off the wheel. This is the step that gets skipped, and it is the step that finds the damage. A nail that went in at an angle can have cut the inner liner well away from where it entered. You cannot see that with the tire mounted.

Plug and patch, together. One unit, sealing the hole and covering the liner. A rope plug jammed in from the outside is not a repair.

What Colorado's unsafe list actually says

C.R.S. 42-4-228(5)(c) lists what makes a tire unsafe in Colorado. Two of its entries are worth reading before anyone works on your tire.

The tread depth entry: below two thirty-seconds of an inch, measured in any two grooves at three points around the tire, or worn to the wear indicators. The other: "A break which exposes a tire body cord or is repaired with a boot or patch."

Read that second one carefully, because it is about a break in the casing, not about a puncture in the tread. We do not boot a casing break and we do not patch one. What we repair is a puncture inside the tread area, within the quarter-inch limit, with the tire off the wheel, to the industry standard. A casing break is a replacement, and we say so at the car.

Nobody else is going to measure it for you

Colorado does not put private passenger cars through a periodic safety inspection. C.R.S. 42-4-203 lets a police officer require a spot inspection on reasonable cause, which is a stop, not a schedule. The emissions test you take to register a car in Denver does not list tires among what it examines.

And unlike some states, Colorado sets no separate tread floor on selling a loose tire. The duty in 42-4-228(7) is on selling the vehicle, made a class 2 misdemeanor traffic offense by 42-4-228(8)(b). Nothing in the tire statute stops a seller putting a nearly worn loose tire in front of you. That is a reason to know your own numbers, and a reason we deal only in new tires we supply.

So we measure the tread at the visit and give you the figure, before the conversation about whether to repair or replace. Repair or replace a tire covers where the line usually falls, and find your tire size covers what a replacement would be.

Booking it, and what we need

The price is on screen in minutes, with no callback and no estimate visit. There is no call-out fee, because the trip is inside the number.

We need the car parked on legal, level, paved ground, with room to work around one corner of it. Denver usually has the space. Residential permit parking covers 22 named areas across 971 street segments in the whole city, so most residential kerb here carries no restriction, and 40.5% of Denver housing units are single family detached, generally with a driveway, a pad or an alley apron. Our Denver service area covers where we come, and what mobile tire replacement costs covers the other outcome.

We do not mount tires bought elsewhere, and this is a booked visit rather than roadside rescue.

Our price: $145

A mobile puncture repair on one tire is $145. That is a price, not a range and not a starting point. It buys the trip out, the wheel off, the tire off the rim, an inspection of the inner liner, a plug and patch fitted to the tire industry standard, remounting, rebalancing, a TPMS reset where supported, and the pressure set to the door placard. Nothing is added afterwards for the call-out.

If the nail turns out to have destroyed the tire, you pay for the inspection and not for a repair that did not happen.

Questions people ask

• Should I pull the nail out? No. It is plugging the hole it made. Leave it, keep the pressure up if you can, and book the visit.
• Can I drive on it? If the tire is holding pressure, a short careful drive is a judgement call, and driving a tire flat destroys the sidewall whatever the nail did. The point of this service is that you do not have to make that call.
• The nail is near the edge of the tread. Repairable? Often not. The shoulder flexes constantly and the standard confines repairs to the tread area. We can only answer it with the tire off the wheel.
• Two nails in one tire. Is that still repairable? Sometimes, if both are in the tread area, both are inside the quarter-inch limit and the repairs are far enough apart. That is an inspection answer, not a phone answer.
• Will a repaired tire be as good as new? A correct plug and patch is a permanent repair for the remaining life of the tread. A rope plug pushed in from outside is not, which is why we do not do them.