Things Fall Apart, A Three-Part Suite -- Part I: More Tire Problems

I have been kind of dutiful when it comes to checking the air on my tires.  They say it should be done weekly.  I can do it weekly -- in the parking lot at work after my day has ended.  I do this on Mondays because there are way fewer people at my company on Mondays, which means I can park closer to the designated entrance (due to the pandemic, we are required to check in through self-check-in temperature-taking kiosks which, as of right now, are only at one door), which just so happens to have flat land.  Usually I need to park in the back, and the lot back there is not level.  And, they say that I should measure the air in my tires after leaving my car sitting for a while on flat land.  Hence, it's best for me to do it on Mondays.  There is one proviso: I would not be so dutiful, or obsessed, with checking the air on my tires were it not for one of them bursting flat that one night.  I should be oblivious when it comes to this, but instead, fear has forced me to become diligent when it comes to this chore.

I've been lucky in that the past couple of weeks or times (I haven't been doing them every week, just most weeks) I have not needed to put air in because all four tires have had air pressure at or above the recommended numbers.  That luck ran out yesterday, even though it had to happen at some point.

I was also lucky in that at the gas station closest to me, there was no car and no driver using the free air hose.  There usually is someone there, and instead of waiting I would go to another gas station a little farther away.  Anyway, I pull up and start putting the balance of the air into the tires -- which, for the record (and I won't say which amount goes to which tire because that's anal even for me) was .5, 1.0. 1.5 and 2.0.

Well, I will say that the passenger-side rear tire needed 2.0 ... whatever units of air.  And I put in the hose, then I pull it out because, you know, you need to check with your tire gauge if you put in enough or too much.  I think I put it in this tire and after a second or too, I didn't hear anything.  The sound of air going into the tire stopped, and there was no sound of air going out of it.  It was just ... stuck.

So I pull it out.  I put it in again, and I hear nothing.  And then I look at the valve stem of the tire.  If you take a close look at the valve, there is a skinny notch that is suspended right in the middle of the stem.  That protuberance is the part that sticks out of what is called, I think, the valve core, and I believe that that is the thing that keeps the air in the tire.  You push that thing in, and you let the air out.  And if you look at the air hose, there is a similar notch surrounded by space and a ring; you push that opening up against the stem, the hose's notch pushes down on the valve core's notch, and I assume that air from the hose pushes into the tire, filling it up.

Well, this notch is bent on this tire.  I don't know how it got bent, but I swear I would have noticed it before yesterday if it were.  So it looks like the hose, possibly with help from the cold weather possibly making any surface with any moisture frozen and thus sticky, yanked that core notch out of alignment when I pulled it out, and I think that's the reason the hose could not force any more air inside the tire.

I went out to take a look again at night, well past dinner, to make sure that I wasn't seeing things and that this protuberance really wasn't equidistant from any point of the outside of the stem.  I tried to yank it back into the middle with tweezers from my Swiss army knife, but that didn't work.  Fortunately, I didn't hear any air signaling a slow leak coming from the tire -- yet.  And it looks as though, according to my tire gauge, I managed to fill it up to within .5 whatever units before the valve core got all kinked.  So I have to prepare (maybe, if the reason I can't fill up my tire is because of the relatively cold weather) to go into a shop and get a new valve stem for this tire.  I just hope I am able to get it fixed before that tire loses all air pressure -- assuming I can't put air in it ever again.

This leads me to believe that the brand of tire I got for my car, which besides the one I had to replace are not even two years old, isn't that good.  One tire burst out of nowhere even though I'm sure it wasn't so severely underinflated to the point where such an explosion could happen, and now this, which is a different tire.  Not impressed.

Finally, one thing I've just realized.  I know that the passenger-side rear tire is .5 whatever air units short of where it should be because I used the tire gauge after I saw the air hose couldn't pump more air into it.  My tire gauge has a similar mouth to the air hose, where there's a notch in the middle of a ring.  That notch is also supposed to push in the notch in the valve stem in order to measure air pressure.  My gauge did that, a couple times.  So ... the air hose couldn't push that notch in properly, but my tire gauge could?  Maybe this isn't as big of a problem as I'm afraid it is -- hopefully?