+1 on Safety Seal. This is the kit all the tire shops in my town use. I've used it for years and been happy with the results. You need a heavy duty kit to work with steel belted tires, and this one is it.

Craig.

I like the Safety Seal kit. I keep about 30 plugs and 10 patches in my Jeep, along with the necessary tools and a compressor. I've plugged many a tire out in the woods with my setup.

I have never seen one of these kits. I have used those slimy air-filler things in an emergency.

So, how do these plug things work? Do you put them in from the inside or the outside?

(OK, roll your eyes, I don't care!)

Sue

The plugs are installed from the outside after a bit of prep work (reamer) on the puncture. It can be done in just a few minutes.

Tire plugs rock. Never used them on anything but a four-wheeler (only in the tread, never the sidewall) but they work. And they work very well.

The best kit is a full size spare, giving you adequate time to have your punctured tire properly repaired at a tire shop

How many people on here have replaced their donuts with full size tires? I'd strongly suggest doing this, if you haven't already.

Regarding using a plug to fix a sidewall puncture. I've never done it and I know it's verboten but my son bought a old Firebird with a plug in the sidewall and drove it for many months (probably way too fast) before selling it - with the plug still in the sidewall. I warned him about the plug before he bought the car but he's rather pig-headed. So, if you're in a bad situation (wilderness/disaster/danger) with no way to go except plugging the sidewall, wouldn't it be better to do that and carefully drive to a repair place as soon as possible?

I've used the cheap repair kits quite a few times, most recently just a couple of weeks ago. They work great, never had a problem. Even though they should be only used for a temporary repair, I have pushed my luck with them and never had a failure of the plug. I do have the full size spare as a backup still, but I can plug the tire almost as fast as I can change the spare.

Even though I've never experienced a problem, I've been meaning to upgrade to a better kit, one with metal handles. Somewhere I saw pictures of what happens when one of the cheap T-handled plug reamers break while you're trying to push it through the tire, and it wasn't a pretty sight. The plastic probably gets brittle from old age and heat, so when I use it I try and be careful about how much force I apply. The next one I pick up is definitely going to have metal handles.

I'm guessing the reason they don't recommend it for sidewalls because the sidewall is subject to a lot of flexing, so a plug probably wouldn't last very long there. How long is too long, I don't know, but I would not hesitate to use it for a sidewall puncture if that meant getting home. At worst, it fails down the road somewhere and you either plug it again or you're stuck further along. Although, I'd probably start looking for a replacement as soon as I got back home.

Outside in.

I've seen them used to fill hand sized gashes in sidewalls as temp fixes to get off the trail. This was a plug + stitching combo!! Not a fun thing to do with your hands heh.

The StopnGo plug kit I mentioned earlier is a little bit different from most. It uses a mushroom shaped rubber plug that's installed using a gun like tool. The tool looks like a small calking gun.

The plug is inserted into the tool and there's a part of the tool that is inserted into the hole in the tire, you pull on a handle which forces the plug thru a metal tube and then into the tire, the larger part of the mushroom shape is now on the inside of the tire casing, you pull it outwards to seat it against the casing of the tire. When you inflate the tire, the plug is held tight by air pressure.

No glue, you use a tiny bit of oil to help insert the plug.

They work very well, I've installed them and then ridden on the patched tire for hundreds of miles while on a long trip.

The best way to fully repair involved taking the tire off the rim and using either another type of plug or a patch on the inside of the casing, that's what I do when I'm not sitting on the side of the road with a flat, I use the plug tool to get me off the road or onto my next destination.

Ditto on the full sized spare, on my car I have to use one, it messes up the all wheel drive if you use a different sized tire.