I have a 99 Accord and for the last few years the tires lose air regularly. It became so bad I was adding air every other day. I hear that the aluminum rims corrode and leak air. I stopped the air leaks by adding a half can of flat fixer to each tire. That worked fine so far. I am now looking at a set of new tires and want to clean up the rims and apply rim seal to them before the new tires are installed. Any comments, thoughts or suggestions?

 

Either the tires are messed up you have some seriously messed up wheels...I'm assuming not stock. My guess is the tires.

I've had 4 different sets of aluminum wheels on my car, two OEM, two aftermarket, never had that problem. And one set was an 11 year old set of prelude wheels I was using for winter, no probs.

 

i'm guessing you have a bad valve stem. it's not the rims, it's the tires.

 

How did you let this go for 3 years? What kind of tires and rims do you have?

 

If I could put a dent on c5's and drive around like that without leaking air than it must be either
a) the tire
or
b) valve stem.

 

You are absolutely right...my tire dealer told me that my slow leaks in 2 of my 4 tires were due to little burrs that form when the alloys deteriorate over time, and push the rubber away from the wheel, breaking the seal and allowing air to escape. With new tires, or to repair the existing ones, all you have to do is dismount the tire, sand down the edge where rubber meets wheel to remove the burrs, then apply new bead and re-mount.

Cost me $10 for each wheel, and they have been perfect ever since.

Note: maybe the alloys on the '99 and '00 Accords were more prone to this type of deterioration?

 

Yeah the alloys tend to corrode around the bead and cause air leaks. It was worse on the 94-95 accords.

Just a word to wise remember the next time you use fix a flate read the can, if it says flamable make sure you let anyone tries to repair a flate that its in the tire. The sparks from a reem could ignite the gasses and blow the tire up. Thats if you need a plug from a nail. Not to many people are aware of that.

 

those fix-a-flats makes it really messy for the tire people, then they get pissed off, lol