Avoiding Flat Tires
Posted: Tue Mar 07, 2023 10:45 am
I put about 500 miles per year on my Model T Ford (when I'm not recovering from surgeries or waiting out a pandemic) and in a dozen years of ownership, I've had but one single, solitary flat tire. And that was because some knucklehead had dumped a pile of building materials at the curb and after the trash was collected, a few roofing nails remained on the street. This kind of debris tends to collect near curbs, so the closer you stay to the crown of the road, the less likely you would be to encounter nails and screws.
.
My mistake was to hug the curb while making a right turn instead of staying a car's width away from the puncture-zone. Heck, back when I was a kid, I learned the hard way about keeping my Schwinn's tires out of the "parking lane," so I knew better. But the momentary need to cut a corner so as not to slacken my speed right before a hill was what did me in. Had I swung wide, accepted the speed loss and down-shifted instead, my record of no flats in a Model T would have remained perfect.
.
Some lessons are easier to learn than others. Now, I've been married for quite a few decades, but being acutely dense, I have only just recently come to the realization that a clutterbug like myself should never ask his better half where some misplaced item may be—or worse—to ask her for help in finding it. On one particular occasion, such short-sightedness on my part resulted in a hands-on-hips, head moving side-to-side castigation which led with: "Well, if you'd only clean this place up, then maybe you'd be able to find it!"
My reply was to the effect that the word, "maybe," has never been found in any binding contract (and as any schoolboy knows, the word, "maybe" is about as reliably promissory as the parental phrase, "We'll see").
To that irrefutable gem of logic, my beloved retorted, "Well, just so you know, if you don't clean up this mess, I WILL!"
Oh, for a married man, nothing good has ever followed the phrase, "Well, just so you know..." Realizing that I was in a state of unequivocal defeat, I shuffled back into the garage and, while grumbling to myself like Fred Flintstone, grudgingly started box-stacking, picking-upping, throwing-outing, broom-shoving and dustpanning.
.
That exercise with the broom and dustpan yielded up an impressive concrete-floor harvest of broken drill-bits, bent up cotter-pins, upholstery tacks, staples, screws, nails and even a couple of rusty, tetanus-impregnated X-acto blades. That no such garage-inhabiting scrap of metal had ever punctured any of my tires amounted to an astounding statistical improbability. Equally surprising was the happenstance that I did indeed find the item I had misplaced, thus proving my wife was right; this occurring simultaneously with her entering the garage to suggest where the misplaced thing might be, only to witness me staring with astonishment at the item in hand—surrounded by a freshly cleaned and neatened garage. You'd think I'd have known better, at that point, than to make eye-contact.
.
Oh, well.
.
In any case, it was a very lucky thing indeed that I hadn't at some point earned a flat tire right there in the garage, what with all the sharp debris on the floor. I have, since that epiphany, become a devotee of keeping the garage swept nice and clean—much to the unfortunate and insufferable satisfaction of my wife. A word, to the wise, is sufficient: Learn from my experience—and chagrin.
.
All that having been said, we now come to the question of whether it is necessary for a brass-car driver to carry spare tires and a jack. Well, if you car has demountable rims, carrying that stuff does makes sense. If, on the other hand, your car has the old-fashioned type of non-demountable wheels... well, maybe not. See, I spend an extra hundred bucks each year for towing insurance and it's good within a one-hundred-mile distance from my Long Island home. When my tire suddenly went flat, I pulled over to the curb, phoned Hagerty and they sent a guy with a flat-bed truck and chains wrapped in velvet. Velvet! If you have that kind of towing insurance and you stay within 100 miles of your home, you don't need to carry spares—and if you keep your wheels away from the curb when making right turns, it may be a whole lot less likely that you'll experience a flat in your brass car.
.
Oh. Also, when your wife tells you to clean up, just do it. It's better than getting the twin laser beams and a great, big, Alice Kramdenish "I-told-you-so."
