draughtyknee

Spoke too soon. Months down the line from my previous posts and now all 4 tyres are losing pressure again. For now all that I am doing is to choose my petrol station for working airline rather than lowest petrol price, as every time I need petrol I need air in all 4 tyres too and footpumps aren't designed for such intensive use. Longer term I shall ask my tyre specialist to look at it again if I need other tyre work doing, and/or the Ford main dealer when it next goes in for a routine service as to whether it is a known Ford issue with a known cure. In the meantime it is just very annoying - in 27 years' motoring I have never known persistent tyre pressure problems like this. Finally a reminder to all Galaxy owners with these wheels (including myself) that tyre under-inflation is dangerous and illegal so do please keep checking your pressures much more regularly than you are used to - even if it seems to settle down for a while.

I have been topping up a 2004 2.3 Zetec a lot in the run up to identifying a leak from the thermostat housing which has now - hopefully - been fixed by a Ford dealer. I too noticed the syndrome of wet battery housing and of the hole under the expansion tank's filler hole. The expansion tank is so awkward to access that even when topping up carefully, I know that some went in the wrong part of the filler and hence straight out of the hole underneath. Hopefully I now have the right thing to not top it up messily next time but even so I know it won't be easy. So I shall be very interested to watch this topic to see if it's just a question of not being clumsy when topping up with coolant, or whether the Galaxy is prone to delivering (presumably hot, pressurised) coolant to the battery & associated electrics (which can't be good for it) all on its own every once in a while.

Well after months of getting used to pumping them up all the time, and then thinking that they had lost pressure even after the visit to the tyre dealer, I have now checked the pressures properly and after a week they are steady. Hooray! So it looks like my trusted local tyre specialist knew their onions. Whatever they did when they fitted the new ordinary rubber valves in place of the decorative metal ones seems to have sorted the problem. As for the original metal valves, I'm glad I asked to keep them but have no appetite for refitting them. So the most likely scenario is that they will be handed, in a bag, to the next owner.

I have looked again at the original metal valves, the corrosion seems to clean off the rubber seal OK, so the main issue would seem to be to get the tyre fitter to clean off the corresponding part of the valve area of the wheel so as to make a good seal - and to then discourage the corrosion from returning, for a few years at least. Anybody tried having the tyres pumped up with nitrogen to avoid oxidation?

I have a 2004 Zetec with 16" alloys, same as the first chap. My trusted tyre specialist used leakfinder (?soapy water?) to show me the leak on all 4 of the original metal valves. With leakfinder you can see the air coming out of the thread area of the nut shaped section - a few mm from the dust cap, though the air should never have got this far - it is the rubber seal right at the base of the valve, inside the wheel, which has failed. The specialist replaced all 4 with ordinary valves, so the one sure thing is that air will not escape from the join in the metal valves again. However I am unconvinced that the new valves will not leak, I have a feeling that the tyres need taking off so that the valve hole can be thoroughly inspected, cleaned and made smooth, to enable a good seal. Anybody know about these metal valves - can you get replacement rubber seals without spending an arm and a leg?