New Tyres, Balanced and Aligned

The wheels come off the car, the old tyres are broken down and taken away for recycling, and the rims are inspected on the inside face where kerb damage and corrosion hide. New tyres go on with fresh valve hardware, and on cars with pressure sensors the service kit, meaning the seal, nut and core, is replaced rather than reused. A five-year-old rubber grommet is exactly what leaks a week after a tyre change.

Each wheel is dynamically balanced with weights set on both planes rather than clamped to the outer rim only, and inflated to the placard pressure cold. Then a four-wheel laser alignment: toe, camber and caster where the car allows adjustment, plus the rear thrust angle, so the back axle is pointing where the front wheels think it is.

Tell us the car, how far you drive and what you actually care about: quiet, wet grip, tread life, or a load rating for towing. Those pull against each other, and the useful conversation is about which two matter most to you. We read your old tyres before recommending anything, because the wear pattern is a diagnosis. Feathered inner edges point at toe, one-sided wear at camber, cupping at tired dampers, centre wear at over-inflation and both shoulders at under-inflation.

Directional tyres go on with the rotation arrow the right way round and asymmetric tyres with the outboard face out, which sounds obvious and is the most common fitting error on a rushed change. Wheel nuts are torqued to your vehicle figure, and we ask you to call back in so they can be re-checked after the first hundred kilometres, once the wheel has fully seated against the hub.

Age is the one almost nobody checks. Every tyre carries a four-digit date code on the sidewall giving the week and year it was made, and rubber hardens with time whether the car is driven or parked. A tyre with plenty of tread and eight Dandenong summers behind it has lost wet grip you cannot see, and the spare under the boot floor is usually the oldest tyre on the car.

The second is puncture repair. A nail through the crown of the tread, away from the shoulder, can be properly repaired from the inside with a combined plug and patch once the tyre is off the rim. A sidewall or shoulder injury cannot, because that area flexes on every rotation. An external plug pushed in without demounting the tyre is a get-you-home measure, not a repair, and we will tell you which one you have.