Tire Ballast Seepage Leak

[mmranch]

Sigh...

Went to start putting on the snow chains and noticed that my Rear Right wheel has the tire tube stem seeping calcium chloride ballast pretty good.

I change the rear wheel valve cores about every 6 months to stay ahead of the corrosion there and I did this about 2 months ago. But this seepage/leak seems to be coming from where the stem goes into/through the wheel. The stem has had a minimal seepage leak for about 2 years but clearly it is worse than it was. The wheel is basically dry everywhere but this is happening at the stem.

Because of our difficult winters and being remote, etc. I'd really like to not get into fixing this until Spring if I could get away with it.

Just wondering what other's experiences are with this kind of tube stem leak? Can it hold together for a long time and just be messy or is it about to blow??

Thanks!

 

[Mike1955]

It sounds like it would be equally as much trouble to just patch that up as to fix it. And I don’t know how I would just temporarily stop the seep. Would it be to much to just get organized and remove the wheel, take it in for repair and put it on. I do that stuff easily all time

 

[DarkBlack]

Calcium chloride. Better deal with it ASAP, rather than the spring, since it’s going to rust your rim starting at the stem hole.
If you’re positive it’s not just the valve core, you should pull the wheel and either replace the tube, or change to tubeless with a non corrosive ballest.
I suppose you could go through the effort to always park valve stem at 12:00 orientation, if you really don’t want to deal with it till spring. You could even release air pressure for long spans of non-use. That would minimize losses when not in use

 

[mmranch]

Thanks for the ideas!

It's a major project for sure. I did it about 8 years ago on the Left Rear wheel.

Because we're on the top of a mountain far from civilization in an extreme climate environment... everything is hard, particularly in winter. Our shop is very tight and that makes things hard. I use an engine lift to remove the rear wheel and I've got to have room to maneuver that as it only works from certain angles. The 60 gallons of CC have to be pumped out and stored first before removing the wheel. Once the wheel is off, I fight to disassemble the wheel, grind and paint the wheel, install a new tube, remount the tire, reinstall on the tractor, and refill with CC. Doable... but a pain. (My ancient pickup truck is put away for the winter and doesn't really function in winter so using that to haul the wheel to the city adds to the difficulty). We are just a few days away from the snow flying here. Big projects like this are much better done in the summer but oh well... I may have no other choice.

I'm not worried about the CC corroding things as the wheel will be cleaned up before reassembly. I've thought about using Permatex Ultra Black to cover the stem/wheel hole (except the cap) to try to minimize seepage at the stem until spring. It's totally dry everywhere except at the stem hole.

Thanks again.