July 23rd, 2007 : This is not Formula One racing nor another James Bond movie flick but certainly, my friend & I had a close call last Saturday. My friend wanted directions to a place in the Free Trade Zone area in Penang. Since he was unsure, I became the human GPS navigation unit. I hopped on to his car & he drove about 20 kilometers southbound. Since we are on a coastal highway, we were traveling about 80 km/h – 90 km/h. Not too fast or too slow for highway/expressway speed.
On the way home, we decided to go to town to have some light snacks. Because of the nature of the roads in the town area, the driver got to slow down to an average speed of 40 km/h. We passed our old secondary school & turned into Penang Road. Drama starts. We felt vibrations & a puncture. We felt too that the rim was rubbing against the asphalt. The driver pulled over to a taxi stand & this is what we saw.
This is not a classic puncture. This is a tyre failure. Oh my. I wasted no time taking out the spare tyre, jack & tools to change. The tyre was indeed an old one. Guessed it can’t take any torture anymore. It was my first time changing a tyre & it’s not even my car! How can I give my first tyre changing experience to someone else’s car? What did I do to deserve all these? Oh well, all this while, I’ve been through the theory & practical, however not that day. It’s time for me to put what I’ve learnt into a real test. Everything went fine, I managed to jack the car up a little but, took off the tyre cover, got myself some cuts & I’m stuck. Great!
I was unable to figure out the way to loosen the nuts. The nuts just won’t loosen up on whichever directions I turned no matter what. What to do next? I called for backup, my friendly personal mechanic who was taking his break. He came about 15 minutes later & wrapped it up in like 5 minutes. He made me looked like a complete idiot and fool. The sky was about to pour luckily it didn’t. After completing the change, he guided us to a nearest tyre shop & my friend changed all four of his tyres.
The tyre technician & the mechanic mentioned that if it would to happen on high speed, we would most probably lose control of the car. We escaped death since we were traveling on speed more than average about 10 minutes ago.
Posted in Uniquely Firsts
