Tire Slime

[ALBALD1]

I worked in a garage a few years ago & had a car come in for a vibration. I kept spinning on the tire balancer & kept getting different results. I was like the imbalance was moving in position & also in weight. It would jump from 1oz to 4oz. Finally, one of the old timers told me to break the bead & drain the fix-a-flat out of it. Sure enough, it was full of that stuff. It was a lot of liquid just rolling around when I spun the tire. Once I cleaned it out, it balanced w/ no prob. I don't know if slime would do that or not. I've only used it in atv, lawnmower&other offroad type applications. I would only use the fix-a-flat in an emergency & plan on removing when the tire was fixed permanently.

 

[gemini5362]

I worked in a garage a few years ago & had a car come in for a vibration. I kept spinning on the tire balancer & kept getting different results. I was like the imbalance was moving in position & also in weight. It would jump from 1oz to 4oz. Finally, one of the old timers told me to break the bead & drain the fix-a-flat out of it. Sure enough, it was full of that stuff. It was a lot of liquid just rolling around when I spun the tire. Once I cleaned it out, it balanced w/ no prob. I don't know if slime would do that or not. I've only used it in atv, lawnmower&other offroad type applications. I would only use the fix-a-flat in an emergency & plan on removing when the tire was fixed permanently.

It actually says on the bottle that you are not to use slime in tires that go over 45 mph unless they are on a trailer.

 

[patrick_g]

It actually says on the bottle that you are not to use slime in tires that go over 45 mph unless they are on a trailer.

NOw there is an UNUSUAL event... Someone read the MFG's supplied info!

Interesting though, I wonder if that prohibition is related to performance and ties to the balancing difficulty or if it is, as is so terribly prevalent these days, a liability reduction strategy not necessarily related to balance. Would a MFG want to encourage someone with a defective tire which may have been previously run with low pressure to drive at highway speeds and risk a big lawsuit?

Additional information. There is an aluminum colored powder which is added to tires via the stem in lieu of using wheel weights to balance a tire/wheel assy. When I bought six 19 1/2 inch Alcoa aluminum wheels with Michelin 245/19.5 tires they came as palletized freight premounted and inflated AND with the BALANCING POWDER instead of wheel weights.

The powder is free to spread out as influenced by the dynamic forces (centrifugal force, vibration, etc.) JUST LIKE LIQUID is free to move inside the tire under the influences of the same forces. I'm sure there is someone somewhere with negative comments regarding the powder. I was skeptical but open minded. I have 60,000 milies on these mud and snow tires (highway, gravel road, dirt road, and off road) and they have half their tread left. There are no wear patterns to indicate poor balance nor are there any vibrations noted at any speeds 0-100+ so I am thoroughly satisfied with the results and my initial skepticism has subsided in the performance area.

The powder is a pain in the butt if you have to break a tire down and remount for any reason as it gets in the way of bead seal, spills out and so forth which is a hassle. If I hadn't had several occasions where when rotating the tires the mech would roll the tire past an obstacle and shear off a stainless steel tire stem so frequently that I carried spares and warned folks in advance which insulted them and they still broke a stem.

So I don't understand wha a freely moving powder would act so very differently than a liquid. On one hand a product is sold for tire balancing and on the other we have a report that a SIMILAR situation resulted in balance difficulty. I wonder if the liquid product had formed any lumps that could have moved around. That would have changed the balance. Yet another of those things that make you go HMMMM.

Anyone have a theory as to why a liquid would act different from a fine powder as far as being distributed inside a rotating tire?

I know folks who use SLIME in highway tires who have probably never read the instructions and they have not reported difficulties with tire balance problems as evidenced by wear patterns or vibration. Don't know about any difficulty getting a balance reading on one of the automatic balance spinner rigs. I know a place that will still uses the OLD FASHIONED unit that spins the tire while on the vehicle so the entire rotating assy is balanced. Maybe some time when I am out his way I will ask about balancing tires with slime in them.

Pat
Pat

 

[podagrower]

The "powdered balancers" are more free floating and don't clump together. So they don't throw the tires out of balance like the sealers, which by design stick together.

 

[DieselPower]

A funny story about the balance powder. A couple of years ago a guy brings me a truck with a horrible front end shake. I took it out on a test drive and sure enough it was shaking bad enough to knock out your fillings. I took the tires off and was going to balance them when the driver said it wasn't needed because they had Equal (probably the stuff you have seen before) in them. I am familiar with the Equal and had never seen a problem with it before. Stuck the tire on the balancer and sure enough it was way out of balance but my machine couldn't make heads or tails out of it and said it was a bad tire. I went to dismount the tire and noticed there was liquid in the valve core when I removed the valve cap. The driver said he had had a flat and put in two cans of fix a flat. Yep, powder and liquid don't mix or should that be they do. In any case, I removed the tire, cleaned out the gunk, reinstalled it and threw in a new bag of Equal and the problem went away.

 

[gemini5362]

I just said what the directions call for. The reality is that my wife when we were dating hit a hole in the street in tulsa, ok. The hole bent her rim but it still held air. She came to visit me one weekend and the weather turned cooler, when we got up on Sunday morning her tire was flat. I saw the bent rim and asked what happened and she told me that it had been like that for a few months. I got some slime and put in her tire and told her that should hold it until we could get her a new rim. I got a new rim a couple of weeks later. Her tire was still holding air so I kept it as an emergency spare. A year later she sold the car and gave them the extra rim but it was still holding air. I never noticed any kind of vibration on her car while we were driving it and I have used it in other cars without any problem. Recently I put it in a tractor tire and it seems to be working there. But for any advice I give I like to make sure that people know what the Manufacturer suggests and they can make their own decision from that. I believe the instructions on the gallon jug I bought called for my tractor called for the diameter of the tire in inches times the width of the tire in inches x .12 for tires driven under 45 miles per hour.

 

[patrick_g]

Diesel, Pretty funny. Guy needed to be reminded to "keep his powder dry!" The water based lube stuff they put on beads to ease mounting tires is often applied in excess in a lackadaisical manner by the "tire guy" and can wet your powder.

Gemini, I too believe you need to know the "normal" use and MFG's suggested use and restrictions and then if you want to "expand" the envelope and can do so from a position of knowledge without too much risk AND there is good reason, give it a whorl.

Pod, I
m mnot sure I buy the clumping thing. My observaton of slime is that it doesn't clump in 2-3 years in the bottle and id doesn't clump within a few months in the tire. IT needs to stay highly mobile to work. It has to flow to the leak to plug it. The idea is that the fibers in it get in the hole and as the lquid tries to get out between the fibers the smaller fibers are carried into the spaces and the plugging gets better and better. Of course the liquid component "cures" into an adhesive rubbery substance on extended contact with air.

I suppose if you removed and replaced enough of the air in your tire often enough the repetitive loss of humidity would eventually dry the Slime and then it sure woiuld start to clump up and stop flowing. So long as it could flow freely I still think it would act quite similar to the powder.

Maybe someone with access to a spin balancer and some balance powder could spin a tire/wheel and see what was indicated for weights. Then add the powder and see how the machine sees it. Then remove the powder and put something like a pint of tap water in the tire and re spin it and observe the indicated weight sizes and locations. It would be interesting to know if the fluid dynamically balances the tire close to or the same as the powder.

Of course you wouldn't want plain water in your tires for normal ops due to corrosion but anti-freeze or other good anti rust liquid might be OK. If I had one of those spin balancers I would find out how much liquid it took to do what or if liquid coilid replace the powder.

Pat

 

[ToddW]

All I know is I have a slow leaker on my JD garden tractor and I'm off to Walmart for some Slime, green/blue/purple/pink, doesn't matter to me as long as it holds air. Lots of thorns around the edges of the yard.

/Todd

 

[Teamfold]

I have tried all sorts of tire gimmicks. I do a lot of inside digging and Demo work with my B-21
2 years ago my Kubota dealer Foam filled the front tires.
Never a flat again.......
It works.
It was 100 per tire.

 

[patrick_g]

Teamfold, Slime and foam fill are both credible approaches to similar problems. Neither is more of a "GIMICK" that the other. Foam will work for punctures too large for slime to handle but it has some downsides: cost (get an estimate for rear tractor tires), harsher ride, can unbalance a tire pretty thoroughly and make road speed awkward, especially with larger sized tires. With a garden tractor you could go for a non-inflatable tire and get the benefits of foam with less cost.

You can get inserts (shields) that you put inside the tire and run tubes. The shields keep thorns and such from penetrating the tube and you still have the soft ride. The shields can be moved to new tires when the old wear out. The expensive foam can't be ported to another tire.

Tires filled for ballast preclude using foam but you can use the insert/shield idea and run tubes to hold the liquid fill.

Lots of choices and many of them are good ones in most cases. The important thing is that it works for you!

There is a lighter softer foam that isn't so harsh riding and my manual forbids liquid fill (same model without cab can have filled tires) so I am a candidate for foam or tubes and shields. Some of the contractors mowing the bottle infested roadsides use foam and run the tires till they look like they are shredded and about to disintegrate but they tractor on as long as the tires support the tractor.

Pat