While prepping my car for a trip to VIR next week, I discovered a bad valve stem in my front right tire. I had checked tire pressures just before this but I never tried bending the valve stem purposefully, only putting the air gauge on/off and setting the cold pressure. There was no sign of lower tire pressure before or after I discovered this, but it definitly was losing air whenever I cocked the stem towards the center of the wheel.
I post this here since I personally never thought to check this in the past, only pressures/tire wear/ect/etc. It ends up there was a tear in the stem where it meets the TPMS sensor. It's very odd that it provided a 100% air seal unless it was bent, but it was. I hate to think what would have happened if the stem decided to totally fail at 150 MPH on the back straight. Just another thing for me at least to check before going out....
I post this here since I personally never thought to check this in the past, only pressures/tire wear/ect/etc. It ends up there was a tear in the stem where it meets the TPMS sensor. It's very odd that it provided a 100% air seal unless it was bent, but it was. I hate to think what would have happened if the stem decided to totally fail at 150 MPH on the back straight. Just another thing for me at least to check before going out....