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Re: Rim Leak
On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 19:20:56 -0800, "Joe" <frailey750@yahoo.com>
wrote:
[color=blue]
>Today I'm driving home and a guy next to me points to my right front tire. So, I go to a near by gas station and fill my almost flat tire up. 32 miles later I arrive at the tire place where I bought the tires for my 2000 Rave4. A half hour later they tell me I have a rim leak. A rim leak? I've never heard of such a thing. The guy shows me where on the rim the small leak is coming from and tells me I will have to order a new rim from Toyota. $136.00 dollars later and the rim will be in at Toyota in two days. I'm told 15 bucks to install the new rim to the older tire. I've never heard of this rim leak thing. Both places the tire company where I bought the tires as well as the Toyota parts department told me this does happen quite often. I've been driving for some 38 years now and have never had this happen. My rims are factory rims by the way.
>Joe[/color]
As an aside, guy: Usenet News is, and was designed from the
inception as, a plain-text medium first and foremost. It dates back
to the days when you had a 110-baud modem at home, not a 2 Megabit DSL
connection. The less overhead wasted, the better.
We don't need to use "Franklin Gothic Medium" font to read a simple
question about automobiles - the default desktop font works fine for
most people. (I didn't go looking for text and background colors or
"blink" tags, but some people have really bad taste and make the text
psychedelic - Gamma Green letters on a Gamma Red background that will
melt your eyeballs...)
This isn't a webpage. (Although if you read through Google Groups
they may have ported it into one - But it didn't start that way.)
Please turn off the HTML, and turn on the word wrap. And a paragraph
break once in a while would be nice too, while you're at it.
Thank you for your attention to this matter. ;-P
Now then, back to the subject at hand...
Rim leaks can happen with cast aluminum wheels - you get a few air
bubbles or some slag (dirt, sand, oxidized aluminum, misc. cruft) in
the molten aluminum during the casting process. It might not be
visible in the raw casting. And if it goes all the way from the
finished machined inner surface to the finished machined outer surface
you end up with a leak.
And it might test as holding air fine at the wheel factory, then
over time some water gets in, or it gets hot and the crud melts and
dissolves out of the channel, or a little corrosion eats through the
final layer, and the leak opens up after a delay.
Of course, the other potential cause of a rim leak is smacking into
a curb or hitting a nasty pothole, and the leak is the first sign of a
structural crack developing in the wheel - you have to check for that.
It's really REALLY bad when a wheel comes apart at speed, it can cause
some serious driving excitement...
At $136 you are getting off easy. I've heard of factory rims
running $300, $400, and more each. But don't throw away the wheel
that leaks quite yet.
I've seen simple porous spots fixed by putting a thin layer of epoxy
or polyester (fiberglass) resin on the inside of the wheel to seal the
leak. Mark the leaky spot on the outside of the rim, scuff an area on
the inside clean with a coarse Stainless Steel wire brush to get a
clean surface so the resin sticks, and make a 'patch' coating of resin
on the inside where you think the leak starts.
If you can see the exact spot on the inside where the leak starts,
you might be able to find an expert welder in your area to fix it. 30
seconds with a TIG welder, one little puddle of weld metal to fill in
the hole, and it's all better permanently.
But too big a weld puddle might affect the wheel structurally, so it
needs to be done with delicacy. With aluminum, it's a VERY small
temperature rise between the small molten surface puddle you want and
where you melt a big hole straight through (oops!) so the welder needs
to carefully control the heat input. Some cast aluminum alloys need
to be pre-heated before welding to avoid forming cracks - they put the
wheel in a calibrated oven at 400F to 600F to warm it up.
The welding shop probably has the dye penetrant crack testing kit or
the Magnaflux® system needed to look for those potential structural
cracks I mentioned earlier.
And if all else fails and you can't stop the leak (but the rim has
been inspected and deemed structurally sound) they do make inner tubes
designed for use with Radial tires, and you can use that rim as the
spare. The radial tubes have a red valve stem for easy positive
identification.
--<< Bruce >>--
--
Bruce L. Bergman, Woodland Hills (Los Angeles) CA - Desktop
Electrician for Westend Electric - CA726700
5737 Kanan Rd. #359, Agoura CA 91301 (818) 889-9545
Spamtrapped address: Remove the python and the invalid, and use a net.
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