flat tire in the Philippines
Once in a while a car gets a flat tire. So also our car.
We have changed the tire for the spare one and tried to find out the next step. We were told to go to a vulcanizing shop and have the tire fixed. The term ‘vulcanizing shop’ is typical Philippines. I have never seen it in Europe or America.
So we did stop by a place where the sign said: ‘tire service’.
And ‘YES’ they were able to fix the tire for only 60 pesos per hole.
After unloading the defective wheel they pumped it full and checking it in a basin filled with water. There they saw that there were bubbles coming on only one specific place. Further investigation shows that there was a small nail in it causing the flat tire.
Our tire is tubeless, like most of the tires these days. They just removed the tire from the wheel, removed the nail and scraped and sandpapered the inside a little. After that they cleaned it with some cleanser. Now they are putting a kind of rubber sticker on the hole and put the tire in a hot press where the ‘vulcanizing’ process takes place. After 5 minutes it is done and the tire will be put on the wheel again, filled with air and checked again for punctures in the water basin.
No more holes of course, it was only one small one. The guy was even asking if he should put the wheel on the car again, which we didn’t want. We are going to use this wheel now as our spare one.
After paying 60 pesos we were finished and could go home again. The whole procedure took about 15 to 20 minutes.
Filipino time:
Hi Jan,
You young guys aren’t up on your automotive history.
Vulcanizing is the process generally credited to Charles Goodyear which used heat to chemically cure natural rubber so that it could be used to make inflatable tires.
Like so many other things common in the Philippines, when I was a boy in the US more than 50 years ago, every quality service station advertised ‘Vulcanizing’. There were patches that just were glued on the tire tube (almost all tires had tubes then), or you could go for the deluxe method and have the patch Vulcanized … with a heated clamp, just as your tire was repaired … the patch essentially becomes part of the tire itself.
In the US it’s common today to repair a nail puncture like yours with a rubber plug that is driven into the hole that the nail made, but demounting the tire and Vulcanizing an internal patch is by far the superior way.
I know it makes me sound old, but sometimes the old ways are indeed the best.
Hi Dave,
Well, I am not very much interested in cars, that’s probably the reason I am not good in automotive as you name it. I am turning sixty soon, so I am not that young anymore.
Fact is that I have never seen the term vulcanizing in Europe at car repair shops. What I remember from the old days in Europe is that if someone had a flat tire, just a new inside tube was placed, and if that one was flat it was fixed with some rubber glued on the hole. (maybe a kind of chemical vulcanizing?)
Thanks for the explanation anyway.
Yep, different names abound, but the actual process that make auto tire what they are is technically called vulcanizing. The auto as we know it could have never happened .. the pioneers, like Karl Benz in Europe, Dureya brothers and Ransom Olds in the US (all these guys were old men before Henry Ford came along) created workable ‘horseless carriages’, but the tires of their day .. natural rubber … could rarely run more than a few hundred kilometers, so the motor cars of their day were just a curiosity or a rich man’s toy.
Goodyear’s “vulcanized’ tire was quickly duplicated by John Dunlop and Harvey Firestone and many others and we motorists of the world were off and running.
The patches that just use glue are also commonly called ‘cold patches’ in the US, and there are die hard devotees of both methods. That’s one of the things I like about living in the Philippines .. takes me back to my boyhood sometimes.
Dave,
Thanks for the explanation