Summer is just about upon is and, so far, it looks like being quite a good one, so everyone is planning their holidays, with a view to travelling to their favourite staycation haunts, or even braving the continent on a driving holiday. Here are some summer tyre care tips from experts at a local tyre garage to make sure you get there and back without any stress or worries – about your tyres anyway, the exchange rate and sudden rain showers are probably, sadly, inevitable!
Check Inflation Levels
While we might all be sitting out in the sun every moment we have to enjoy soaking up the rays, so is your car benefitting from the heat of the sun. And with climate change boosting our temperatures, summers are getting hotter and hotter – so your tyres might even be affected by the hotter temperatures. Properly inflated tyres, left in the sun for a few hours, can end up over inflated as the air inside the tyre heats up and expands. Check your inflation more often when it is very hot to make sure your inflation is still within legal limits.
Valve Release
An additional problem caused by the overinflation of tyres can be extra pressure exerted on your tyres’ valves. If your valve caps are in poor condition – cracked, perhaps – or even missing altogether, the sun’s rays can heat up your tyres so much that the valves are over-pressurised, causing them to break or fail – resulting in a flat tyre. Check valve caps every now and then, making sure they are tight and in place. And if they are not, you can buy your car tyres in Castleford at Reg Greenwood’s website here.
Test Tread Depth
Your tread depth is invaluable on wet, muddy, icy, or otherwise slippery roads, which can mean that it gets overlooked when it comes to summertime. With clean dry roads, even the barest legal tread depth will cope just fine! Won’t it? Well, maybe not! Summer can bake the roads and fields hard, meaning that sudden summer storms (which are common!) can leave a lot of standing water on the roads for long minutes at a time. And that standing water does need good treads in order for your car to drive over it without skidding or hydroplaning.
