Those of you following the bike tyre saga at home will be pleased to hear that THIS time (slow leak in front tyre for the past month; explosive flat two days ago in the back) I finally gave in and bought pre-slime-filled, special un-flattable inner tubes.
One of them even came with special, straight-out-of-the-packet holes! Yup, that's right. Three of 'em. Since I had bought the last two tubes the shop had in my size, I decided to patch the holes instead of returning the tube. Unfortunately, I only spotted two of the holes to start with. Fixed them. Put the tyre on (back wheel, so very frustrating to fix). Pumped it up.
Aaaaaaaaannnnnnd....five minutes later it was totally flat. At which point (okay, actually after another twenty minutes of wrestling the wheel off) I found the third (quite tiny) hole. I was out of patches by then, so I took all my wheels off again (okay, both wheels, but "all" conveys my sense of frustration far better), reorganised the tyres so that the good slime tube was on the back, replaced the front tube with the old, slow-leaking one, and vowed to return to the shop and bite someone in charge until they give me a refund. (Also to do: recover from parenthesis addiction (maybe).)
The thing is, I thought slime was supposed to SEAL small holes.
Universe? What am I doing wrong???
In other, totally unrelated news, this is hilarious.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Bicycle fail
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 Comments:
UGH!
I'm guessing you've already tried the tires (or tyres, down there) with kevlar linings?
I have to laugh at myself; now I'm all superstitious that just commenting on this thread is going to make my tires go flat.
I think the bicycling gods must just be tyred of you.
How do you know the holes were there when you bought the tubes? Did you inflate them before installing them in your tyres, or aftwards?
If after, whatever initially caused your flats is still in your tyre or rim. You need to remove the little bits of glass and other sharp objects before installing the tube. Good luck with that.
Yokota - the useful thing about tyres with slime in is that holes are immediately visible because of bright green goo oozing out of them. As I took the tube out of the box, green goo dripped on me, and the holes it was coming from were obvious (two of them, anyway). I patched those, THEN put the tyre on the bike. Then discovered the third hole.
It's possible the third hole was caused as I was patching the first two, if there was something sharp on the surface I had laid the inner tube on. But not in the tyre itself - I always check that for sharp things.
Usually the culprit is glass. One of these days I'm going to do a photo-essay of all the patches of glass I ride over/past (depending on how quickly I spot them) on the way in to university every day.
Do you cycle across a cactus graveyard or something?
Ah, clearly defective, then.
But, I regularly use slimed tubes. If the holes are large the green stuff gets out, but mostly it works as advertised. Your tubes are defintely damaged goods.
I think the Universe has a message for you here. Not quite sure what though.
I'm not a frequent commentator around here (did I ever wrote a comment actually?) but I am an avid reader which is why I've nominated you for a wonderful award-thingie (even though I am not quite sure what it is about): http://unsubstantialbubbles.net/post/2008/08/23/Awarded
Talk to me! (You know you want to!)