Nitrogen Tire Top Off Kit

jimduchek wrote:
The biggest advantage to having pure N2 in your tires instead of 'air' is that if you have steel wheels, there can be no internal rusting. And I _have_ had wheels rust enough to cause the bead not to seat properly. Which required some poor kid to spend 2 seconds on them with a grinding wheel -- I don't think I paid extra for that, it was good experience for him anyway :)

With that said I would never pay extra for it, but if the tire shop offers for free, it's better to say yes. It's not worth more than $0.00 for most of us, but if you've got a numbers-stock '57 Corvette and you want to keep those original wheels for the next 50 years, might be worth a couple bucks to put an inert gas in instead of 20% oxygen, but I can't think of any other case.

I sympathize. In the 1960's I had a Sunbeam Tiger. I just "had to have" American Racing Wheels. The model name was Libre. Hideously expensive. When the guy at the delivery point picked one out of the box, he yelled "Whoa!" They were magnesium. Tubes were not an option. American Racing, had sprayed a clear coating on the outside of the rim and it was thick. The aluminum wheels on Quicksilver and the standard steel wheels on my toad are both heavily coated with Rust-O-Leum red oxide primer because commercial tire-fill air commonly sprays out mist.