Wheel carnage

[RaptorVA]

Cross posted this from Suspension forum

Well, this picture kind of changes my path on what I will be doing next...I was driving to work the day before yesterday in fog and fairly heavy traffic. I hit something that I didn't even see in the road and my drivers side front tire immediately went flat. I pulled over to the shoulder on an almost blind curve since I had no choice and got off as far to the right as I dared before going into a 3 foot ditch. Since I wasn't far from home and I have never had the spare off and knew that I wasn't getting it out from under the bed very easily, I called my wife to come and get me. Did I mention it was 34 degrees out and the roads were a little wet and traffic was getting heavy? Hazards on and wife pulls up and we head home. I grabbed the best of my four OEM wheels/tires and the floor jack and headed back to the truck. My ass was about 6 inches from the white line for the shoulder and like a NASCAR pit crew I got to work swapping the flatted tire. There is absolutely no damage to the tire which I found extremely strange. I put the tire up in my wife's QX56 with the inner wheel exposed and saw the damage! WTF did I run over that punctured my rim so perfectly? Almost looks like a 5.56 projectile went through it! Nothing rolling around inside the tire at all. No other damage to anything else on the truck. Lucky that the rim didn't explode after that. Needless to say I will be putting all four of the OEM's back on when I get new tires. I have been driving legally since I was 15, so 42 years of driving and I have never seen anything like this. Comments on the carnage and speculations on the "planet alignment" that caused this are solicited and appreciated.

 

[GordoJay]

Looks like a chunk of junk gouged and then bit into the rim. There's a lesser gouge below the main one that punched through.

 

[CoronaRaptor]

Piece of bent rebar on the road, possibly. Have you driven back to that area and taken a look

 

[The Car Stereo Company]

can you take a pic from farther away? im not sure where on the rim this is.


and what kind of rim? doesnt seem like any rim should do that

 

[TXRaptor]

It looks like the inside of the rim, and I agree that it broke in an unusual way.

What is the brand on the rim?

 

[RaptorVA]

The rim is a SOTA offroad SCAR 6. That is on the inside of the rim. What is strange is I didn't see anyone else swerving behind me after it hit. I also was able to drive by the area just a couple hours later when it was light out and didn't see anything in the road or beside the road. Very strange

 

[smurfslayer]

I’d say you hit something with a very sharp edge, corner or maybe a concrete chunk with rebar sticking out. If your tire deflated immediately, you’re lucky it didn’t shred down to the rim. Was the tire holed, or torn?

I saw a jeep shred a tire - 33 or 35 from the looks and he did a credible job keeping it upright. was on i35 in SATX headed north about 65mph.

My theory on just what I see is sharp corner that perf’d the tire with a big enough hole to pierce through to the wheel. Any chance that tire was low on pressure?

 

[RaptorVA]

The tire is completely intact. Not one blemish on it at all. All tires were aired up fully.. That's why I said the planets aligned or something. Weird!

 

[smurfslayer]

I would lose that tire. If you were running normal pressures and took that kind of damage, you hit something very sharp. I would suspect the tire structure is weakened and could bulge/blow out unexpectedly later.

I’d say you could safely rule out rebar then, or you’d have holed the tire for sure. I beam, concrete chunk or similar that you caught on that side, kicked off to one side and got picked up later. If you drive long enough, you see some weird $hit.

was on the DC beltway at speed one day when a jeep lost it’s wheel, bounced, seemingly in slow motion once in his lane, then higher in his shoulder, then over the divider and behind me on my side of the divider going the other direction.

Another time I’m on the bike, headed across wilson bridge when I spy something coming off the 295 exit from DC. it’s a front drive car with no rear left tire. Sparks are showering from this thing and every expansion joint he hits, the car fish tails. No... Nothing weird there.

The good news is, you can wonder about this online and not from a hospital bed.

 

[Oldfart]

That looks similar to damage I had on a fuel tank some years back. It turned to be a 8" long piece of leaf spring that was damn near invisible when it was laying flat on the road. When you hit it right it can do real damage. You never know what the hell can be laying around.