is it round or flat?

no, this isn’t about the earth…

…that might effect me less.

no, this was about road construction i hit about a month ago whereby some grooved pavement didn’t smoothly transition onto a bridge and so this happened:

but i didn’t know it was that bad because it was on the inside of the wheel. i drove with it like that for weeks and apparently it just got worse and worse, i guess with the weight of the car on it a bit if it got parked just right? it all culminated last saturday when i was driving to the shop and my tire pressure light went off. i’d had a slow leak on that tire, but it was an “add air every thirty days or so” kinda slow, so when i went off i basically went off on myself for not checking it on friday so i knew i was cool for the weekend.

i pulled over on the side of the toll road (always a dicey proposition), used the little air compressor i keep int he trunk, got all right, and got back on the road. but five minutes later (different toll road now) it went off again. so i exited, pulled the u-turn over the bridge, stopped on the flat on ramp shoulder to reinflate, and took off…towards lockhart this time. i had to pull over AGAIN five miles outside of lockhart to reinflate, then got to legion tire and took that pic before he went at it with a rubber mallet and sealed a plug a bit better, but we agreed the culprit was probably a poor bead seal due to the rim bend. he sealed that a bit too, and i rolled into town just fine. same for sunday. monday morning the tire pressure light went off again, so i put on my full sized spare and tossed the bent rim in the back seat.

my boss had told me about some wheel guy that could fix this but he didn’t pick up his phone when i called to find out the name of the spot, but my bmw guru chris picked up his and sent me to wheel technologies. i dropped it off saying i’d pick it up thursday and headed out.

i picked it up thursday and because they didn’t have it ready when i got there i got a pretty severe discount, but i noticed it almost bounced worse after i left…but then i remembered we forgot to put the hubcentric ring on so i sweat my ass off in the back of the pflugerville shop re-affixing that only to STILL have a bit of vibration.

friday i ran to san marcos to my tire spot – for twenty bucks we balanced both the front wheels to zero – the “new” one still has some bounce on the machine like it’s not QUITE straight and it was off an ounce (not a lot of weight unless you’re talking weed or wheels – then it can make quite the difference). it’s a weird vibration, most pronounced when the cars going sixty something…below sixty, we’re good. and once we hit seventy or a bit over we’re good. but the sixties suck. not good. and i have no idea where it’s coming from, so this adventure gets to continue to eat into my time off for a while i’m afraid…