The strangest item Randy Hill ever pulled out of a tire was a coat hanger.
At first, he and his co-workers thought it was a nail. But as they pried it out, the piece of metal seemed to have no end.
“We took the tire off, and inside was a full coat hanger, wrapped around the wheel,” Hill told me, as he invited me around a customer window, talking over the sounds of power tools and workers yelling instructions to each other. “What makes something go into a tire like that, right? It's just weird.”
It’s hardly the only oddity that Hill, 62, the manager at Larkins Bros. Tire Company in the Mission, has extracted from a wheel well. An average of 20 cars pull into the shop every day needing something, usually nails and screws, removed from their tires.
The extraordinary volume has produced some unique finds, a collection of which the shop curates and maintains in a heavy plastic container on the shop’s countertop. As Hill emptied it, the mostly metal pieces spill out like a junk jackpot.
“Swiss Army knife, scissors — there’s a rock that went through the tire and through the wheel,” he told me. I also spotted a bullet, compressed gas cartridge and wrench. Perhaps most surprising to me was the number of full sets of keys, including large car keys, in the collection.
The larger objects in the shop’s container destroyed tires, but nails and screws, left unchecked, can also ruin a perfectly good one. Larkins Bros., a San Francisco legacy business, sells tires, but they specialize in catching problems early, and will always repair a tire, if they can. In a process that resembles an urban pit stop, tires are removed, examined, patched from the inside, inflated and replaced, often within 30 minutes. A patch starts at $45.
I first found Larkins out of necessity. Like many San Francisco residents, I have too much experience with flats. I’ve developed a sixth sense for when something’s amiss, keenly attuned to the tell-tale ticking of a screw or nail head hitting the pavement.
It happened again this past Wednesday, probably my sixth tire puncture in three years, sending me to Larkins with familiar fury and resignation. When I paid the shop another visit Thursday, within minutes I met Oscar Orellana, 61, a Mission resident, who pulled up with a screw in his tire.
A longtime customer, Orellana said he gets nails or screws removed from his tires six or seven times a year.
“It happens all over the city, especially on the curbs where people are working construction,” Orellana said. “You have to be very careful where you park your car. If not, your tire will suffer,” he warned, keeping the screw Larkins extracted as a souvenir.
As Orellana and I chatted, Alacia de Alba, 45, pulled into the lot. She had a nail in her tire, but no hope for a patch: Hill told her the tire was worn too thin, and needed replacing. I asked her if she was a regular.
“Of course,” she said. “I drive the whole day.” She, too, blamed construction as the source of the many screws and nails on the streets.
Rachel Gordon, a spokeswoman for San Francisco’s Department of Public Works, told me by email that it’s illegal to leave debris in the streets — including nails and screws — but unless someone is caught in the act, it’s difficult to hold them responsible.
Mechanical street sweepers clean 150,000 miles of streets annually, Gordon said. The city also employs 130 people who manually sweep sidewalks and gutters.
Residents who witness nails or screws being left behind by a construction crew should call 311, according to Gordon. “We can dispatch a street inspector to assess,” she wrote. “At the very least, we can remind the site supervisor to take better care to keep the area clean,” she added. “We have a handful of operations that can help but there’s no full-proof prevention to keep sharp objects out of tires.”
With rain finally returning to the city, Hill expects a wave of customers. The water pushes debris to the gutters, he explained, where drivers will pick up more than the usual number of nails and screws in their tires. He said he’s heard his share of conspiracy theories, particularly from people who believe they’re being targeted (a sentiment I absolutely understand, having once punctured six or seven tires in as many months).
“People think other people are putting nails and crap underneath their cars to try to make them run over them,” Hill told me. “More than likely it’s the construction.”
