My MINI had her first oil change today and after about an hour, the service guy came out with a "problem." Apparently the checkered valve caps that MINI makes and sells at their dealerships are not compatible with the metal on the valves and they fuse together! They had to do some work and cut my beautiful checkered caps off but they did give me a complimentary tire rotation. So next time you are thinking about getting valve caps... WATCH OUT!

 

I've had my MINI branded checkered caps on for 20 months in the hot desert and they are still like new.

How tight were they?

 

Well.. i'm not too, too strong!! He said it was something with the metal. Are yours plastic or metal?

 

Well... I was mistaken. The ones I have are the MINI wings but they should be the same basic ones as the checkered. Mine are plastic with a little copper piece inside. In fact I have the same ones on both my MINIs and they are all plastic. No issues at all.

 

ive heard of this happening quite a bit. sounds like a dumb mistake on thier part.

 

We've also seen this. The new TPMS valve stems are aluminum, and that can lead to some bi-metal corrosion when sitting next to the chrome-plated valve stem caps.

Obviously the caps were made long before the TPMS stems existed...

--Dan
Mach V

 

MINI sells plastic valve stem caps and metal valve stem caps. If you have the aluminum TPMS valve stems, only use the plastic type, to avoid the problem encountered by the OP.

 

yeah my SA told me my UJ caps that were on my 05 could not be used on my 09 due to metal fusing issues, had to replace them with plastic caps. So I took the old metal ones and put them on my beater pickup