Jap tyre valves?

CruiseGTi-R

CruiseGTi-R

Member
Need some opinions.

I tore my tyre off recently, and in the process lost the valve. No biggie I thought. However, stuck in the middle of Germany it turned out no-one had my valve size, seemed my rims have dinky little valves. They are approx 7.5mm and I think the nearest we could get was 7.8mm.

So, stuck in a garage with one flat tyre between us and getting home we decided to bore it out. ‘DU KANNST ES NICHT BOREN’ (you can’t bore it out) was their reaction. The valve hole in the rim needed to be 8mm to accept the ‘european’ valve size. So the chaps in the garage refused to do it, but said I was welcome to butcher my rims myself, which eerm, I did.

So, drilled the sucker out, and with bits of alloy chipping off all over the place, the new valve slotted in. Tyre inflated ok and to date has held ok.

Right, story over, what do you reckon? They said that you’re not meant to drill alloy. And do you think the valve will hold? Anyone else have jap rims and tiny valves? At my last tyre change in the UK they too said the valves are unusual.

So should I drill out all the valve holes? How quickly would a tyre go down if a valve failed?

Cheers, toby
 
Y

youngsyp

Active Member
kirko said:
i think the valve hole you drilled would have leaked by now if it was going to
Click to expand...
Agreed. If the hole was clean and had a good seal on the valve, there's no reason why it should leak. As for drilling the rim... they had to do something similar to make the valve hole in the first place. As long as the hole hasn't weakend the structure of the rim, you'll be fine.
If you do the other holes, just help the seal out a bit by using silicon sealant around it !!
Oh, and keep an eye on the tyre pressures !
 
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