After months of being slightly irritated by the chronic under-inflation of the left-front tire of my car, I finally brought the car to Klein to let him have a look at it. There wasn’t any nail lodged in the tire but it looked like there may be two tiny leaks. He patched up the areas of possible-leak, changed the stem, told me to wait several days and hope that the repair would fix the problem, and charged me $21.20. If after several days, the tire started going down again, I would have to get a new tire.

VW for some crazy reason(s) used an odd-size tire (215/50R15) for my old-ish and rare (aka unpopular) 1997 VW Passat, and due to the car’s lack of status, tire manufacturers actually stopped producing this particular size! Auto-parts places would have to search warehouses for leftovers of this special tire. With all these factors combined, the new tire would cost $103.50, instead of $50-60 for a regular tire. Hmmm, it doesn’t pay to be special…

While watching Klein work on removing the tire from the rim, I had an enlightening moment which highlighted my auto-ignorance (Ah-ha-Duh moment):

“What?? There’s no inner tube?!!”