In Vienna, VA, we are religious about shoveling the snow off our sidewalks.
God put the snow there.
God will remove it when he’s good and ready.
I tried to take a walk yesterday morning …
… without walking on snow and ice.
But, because I live in the Town of Vienna, that meant spending a lot of time walking in the road.
There’s no requirement to shovel your sidewalk in the Town of Vienna. Unsurprisingly, some sidewalks are shoveled, some aren’t. Which means that you typically can’t walk the length of a block without either walking on an un-shoveled sidewalk, or walking in the road.
This got me to thinking about what the snow-clearance laws are in Northern Virginia. I know there’s no ordinance requiring it in Vienna. But what about the rest of Northern Virginia?
Turns out, Vienna is in the minority. Most of the jurisdictions around here require residents and business owners to shovel their sidewalks promptly after a snowfall.
I find that to be an oddly mixed bag. Loudoun County is in general far more rural than Fairfax County, yet they require snow shoveling while Fairfax does not.
In all cases, the penalties for failure to clear a sidewalk are nugatory, so it’s not clear whether any of the laws are or are not effective. I considered taking a field trip to the People’s Republic of Falls Church to see if their sidewalks really do get cleared or not. But it hardly seems worth it. Give it another few days, and the snow will be gone.
In the end, it’s just another oddity of living in No. Va. These jurisdictions all have the same weather and have pretty much the same population demographics. I’m guessing that the presence or absence of a shoveling ordinance is mostly a matter of historical accident.
In any case, in Vienna, we clear our sidewalks the old fashioned way, via religious observance.
Addendum: Businesses in Vienna VA?
I know there’s no ordinance requiring homeowners to shovel their sidewalks in Vienna, but I was immediately questioned about businesses. You can, and many places do, have different shoveling laws apply for business versus residential.
Old news reporting says that Vienna Town Council turned down any sort of shoveling ordinance in 2011 (Reference The Patch).
And that’s the last Google seems to have heard of it.
A search of MuniCode for Vienna VA for snow yields 13 mentions, none of which have to do with requiring businesses to shovel snow.
A search of the Town Website yields nothing useful, but that’s never definitive.
For sure, the Maple Avenue sidewalks were cleared around here. Here’s Pleasant and Maple, looking west and east.
So, I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be an ordinance requiring it, but something resulted in the clearance of the Maple Avenue sidewalks in my area. This is distinctly different from (say) Nutley, also a multi-lane road, but with large sections of un-shoveled sidewalk.
If it’s due to an ordinance, that ordinance appears well-hidden.
Finally. I finally opened the hood of my 2020 Chevy Bolt, a year after I bought it (Post #1924).
I never saw a reason to look under the hood, figuring I’d have no idea what I was looking at. It being an EV, and all.
Now that I’ve opened the hood, I was not disappointed.
Not ringing a lot of bells with me. I think I recognize a brake master cylinder and tan plastic reservoir mounted to the firewall, driver’s side. But all those big metal thingies? No clue.
Luckily, one can be ignorant and still drive a car. That, proven daily, I’d say.
Even now, I wouldn’t have bothered to open the hood, ever, except that with the recent winter storm, and the resulting sloppy roads, I figured I should top off windshield wiper fluid. Seeing as how that hadn’t been done in a year.
I was able to do that without reading the manual. The hood release was in an obvious place, the hood emergency latch was easy to find, and (shown below) the right place for windshield wiper fluid is pretty clearly marked. Even had a hood prop where I expected to find it.
So thumbs up to Chevy for making that much obvious.
Weirdly, I swear there’s a fan and radiator in there somewhere. For sure, there are several little reservoirs that look like they hold coolant. Plausibly that’s all part of whatever manages the temperature of the battery and the electronics.
It’s magic, as far as I’m concerned.
Plus it runs at a lethal 350V DC. As long is to works, leave it be.
It says something deeply, deeply weird about the soul of America, that people are panic-buying toilet paper in response to the East and Gulf Coast port strike.
I had a few responses to this, in no particular order.
First, guess I’m glad I haven’t worked my way through my pandemic stockpile yet.
Second, maybe I had better pick up some toilet paper at the store today. Just in case.
I fully realize that toilet paper doesn’t move through these ports. Almost all toilet paper used in the U.S. is produced domestically, call it 93% (reference Yahoo). The rest that is consumed in the U.S. is produced in Canada and Mexico, and isn’t shipped by ocean-going freighter.
And yet, it’s a fallacy to say that toilet paper should be unaffected by the port strike. If enough people are stupid and irrational about it, and the target of their stupidity is toilet paper, then toilet paper is very much affected by it.
Oddly, if you substitute “Springfield, OH” for “toilet paper” in the last sentence, it still makes perfect sense.
Anyway, the consequence being that if you need to buy TP, you’ll be every bit as much out of luck, even though a shortage is purely a result of irrationality, as if there some actual disruption of the toilet paper supply chain.
Some consumer items will likely go out of stock from this strike. Bananas being the poster child for that. But who would have guessed that TP remains the canary-in-the-coal mine for American anxiety.
It took about an hour to construct the vehicle and foot traffic counts you see here. The hardware was an $18 Kasa camera, plus my laptop to view the resulting footage.
I let the camera film the street in front of my house. That was not intrinsically different from (e.g.) a Ring doorbell. (It is legal in Virginia to film anything in the public right-of-way, or anything you can view while in the public right-of-way, other than restricted areas such as military installations, as long as you don’t record conversations that you are not part of.)
I then did the simplest thing possible. I transferred the SD card from camera to laptop, and watched the video on fast-forward. It was like the worlds most boring, yet tense, home video. I stopped the film when something happened, and put down tally marks.
The fastest I could comfortably watch was 16X. Doing that, recording the events in eight hours of video took about an hour. (The camera itself is capable of noting the passage of cars, via built-in motion detection, but would not identify passing pedestrians at the distance this was from the street.)
If nothing else, this confirms what my wife and I had both noticed, that this street is used by a lot of dog-walkers.
This is just a proof-of-concept. Today it’s drizzly, and there’s a school holiday, so this would not be representative of typical Friday morning foot traffic.
The context is the value of sidewalk improvements in the Town of Vienna. With rare exception, there are no counts of pedestrian traffic in any of the Town’s various studies. (I did find one, once, but they referred to rush-hour pedestrian street crossing counts along selected corners of Maple Avenue, our main thoroughfare).
The idea being that there’s more value in putting a sidewalk where people will use it, than putting it where they won’t. Assuming that current foot traffic along a route is a good indicator for eventual foot traffic there, once a sidewalk is built. (There could be exceptions to that. But in the main, I think that’s right.)
And that, for planning purposes, you’d like to have some idea of what they’re using a particular route for.
There are currently at least two ways to get pedestrian count data on (e.g.) suburban side-streets that do not have traffic lights. Other than the old-fashioned approach of having somebody sit by the street and count passers-by.
One is to use cell-phone data, because many cell phones track and report their user’s location on a flow basis, and that information is sold commercially. Courtesy of the improved accuracy of GPS, data vendors can now tell you (e.g.) how long the average customer walks around a store, based on how long their cell phones linger there.
(I am not sure that this tracking is entirely “voluntary” or not. That is, did you download an app that, had you bothered to scrutinize the dozens of pages of fine print before clicking “ACCEPT”, would have revealed that you gave that app the right to collection and transmit your location to some central source? Or, just as plausibly, if you don’t manage to turn off every blessed way that your phone can track you, then somebody’s picking up your location on a flow basis, you just have no clue whom? For sure, the phone companies themselves always have a crude idea of where your phone is (based on which cell tower your area nearest), and I’m pretty sure they also get your GPS data, nominally so that they may more accurately predict when your signal needs to switch from one cell tower to the next.)
The problem with counts based on cell-phone tracking that it is of an unknown completeness. Plausibly, some people manage to keep themselves from being continuously tracked. Or, more likely, any one data vendor only buys that data from a limited number of app providers. Generally, it’s fine for making relative statements about one area versus another, but needs to be “calibrated” to real-world observations in order to get a rule-of-thumb for inflating the number of tracked phones in an area, to the actual on-the-ground pedestrian count.
Plus, it costs money, and it’s geared toward deep-pocketed commercial users.
Finally, it’s likely that certain classes of pedestrians will be systematically under-represented in cell phone data, most importantly school children, but also possibly joggers.
The other way to do it in the modern world is to use a cheap camera. Then count by eye.
So, as an alternative, I decided to see how hard it would be to gather that information this way. Turns out, it’s not hard at all, even with doing the counts manually. All it takes is a cheap camera, my eyes, and, for eight hours of data, an hour of fast-forwarding.
Not sure where I’m going with this, in the context of writing up the multi-million-dollar make-over of my little street. I just wanted to prove that it’s not at all hard to get data-based counts of pedestrian traffic on any street. All you need is a camera, and a place to put it. And the time to view the results, if you can’t figure out an automated system for that.
My approach may be a bit low-tech for the 21st century in the surveillance state. But it works. Fill in the hourly wage of (say) the employee who would have to watch that video, and you come up with a pretty cheap way to provide hard data on need for sidewalks, as evidenced by counts of pedestrian foot traffic.
If you’re going to spend millions of dollars on sidewalks … how could you not do this first, to see that the expenditure is efficient, in the sense of pedestrians served per dollar of expense?
More on this still to come.
Coda
As if to underscore the power of the surveillance state, about six hours after I posted this, I got my first-ever email from Kasa, with an offer for a video doorbell.
That, presumably, because this blog post had the words “Kasa” and “doorbell” in it.
This happens enough that I know the root cause of it.
Sure enough, yesterday I signed into Google, using this browser, to access something via my Google account, and I foolishly forgot to sign out. Google was therefore somewhat aware of just about everything I did on this browser in the meantime.
Presumably Google ratted me out to Kasa.
Somewhere, the ghost of Orwell is surely laughing.
Recap: This is a series of posts about replacing the fork bearings on a TiLite Aero wheel chair.
In the first post, I removed the forks from the chair. What should have taken about five minutes actually took several hours, owing to a bearing that was rusted solid onto the fork axle.
In the second post, I worked through all the details on bearings. As long as you know the size of the steel sealed bearings that you need, you can pick them up for around $1 each on Amazon.
This third post is about driving the old bearings out of the fork, and pounding the new bearings into the fork, using only these tools and materials:
a soft vise to hold the forks as needed (I used a Workmate bench).
The snap-ring pliers are not optional, unless you’ve got a whole lot more dexterity than I do. There is one c-clip in each fork, whose purpose is to ensure that the bearings do not slide down from the weight of chair and user. That c-clip is difficult to get in or out without c-clip pliers.
Also, be warned that driving the bearings in with a hammer and “drift” is not for the faint of heart. You end up hammering pretty hard. About as hard as you might when pounding a nail into a 2×4. You have to do that, to get the bearing to seat all the way at the bottom of the hole it fits into.
If the very idea of hammering that hard on an expensive wheelchair part makes you squeamish, then you’ve got good sense. This is nobody’s idea of a good time. But once you’ve started this, either you drive that bearing all the way home or you buy/make a bearing press that can finish off what you started.
If I had to do this multiple times, I’d shop for a bearing puller (to take the old ones out) and a bearing press (to push the new ones in) before I started the repair. There are also kits specifically marketed for common wheelbearing sizes (e.g., a kit for pulling and pressing in R8 bearings).
But you can do it with just the crude tools listed above. That’s how I did it, for this one-off repair. That’s really the point of this post.
Get the old bearings out using screwdriver and hammer.
The basic idea is simple. You’re going to push the top bearing out of the top of the fork. (As shown above, you’d be pushing it from below, so that it moves toward the camera.) Then remove the c-clip, using c-clip pliers. Then push the bottom bearing out of that same opening.
In other words, the top bearing comes out first, then you remove the c-clip, then the bottom bearing comes out. And all of that comes out of the top hole in the fork.
To achieve this you:
Flip the fork over (from what is shown above), and hold it in some fashion. I used a workbench as a soft-sided vise. If you are careful, you can simply rest the flat top of the fork on a couple of cutting boards, or chunks of wood, but you must leave the full width of the hole unobstructed so that the bearing can come out.
Insert a flat-bladed screwdriver through the bottom of the fork (the side away from you, in the view above).
Catch the corner of the blade of the screwdriver on the inner bearing race of the top bearing. (The one nearest the hole that these must come out of).
Give the screwdriver a sharp tap.
Move the screwdriver so that it catches the opposite side of the inner bearing race of the same bearing.
Give the screwdriver a sharp tap.
Move the screwdriver blade back to where you started.
Repeat 2 – 6 until the bearing falls out of the top of the fork.
You keep moving the screwdriver from side to side, as you tap these bearings out, to try to ensure that the bearing stays level within the fork — perpendicular to the axis of the hole in which the bearings sit. The last thing you want is to get the bearing wedged kitty-corner in that hole.
What makes this hard is that these are interference-fit bearings in a metal casing. The hole they fit in — in the fork — is just slightly smaller than the diameter of the bearing. So, while the bearing is friction-fit to the housing, there’s a lot of friction involved.
Which means, in no uncertain terms, you are going to have to tap these vigorously to get them to move. And yet, not so hard that you break them.
How much force? Take a look at this fellow, around 30 seconds into the video to get an idea of what a “tap” is likely to be, for driving a steel bearing out of a metal bearing housing:
He doesn’t bother to move the screwdriver from side-to-side for that particular bearing. But you will want to do that here, particularly for the second bearing, which has to travel quite a ways before it is free.
A better view: This next video provides an excellent view of what you’re trying to do with the end of the screwdriver, at around 1:10 into the video. (Though, this particular bearing came out quite easily.)
Too easy: Here’s yet a third example of this technique, around 30 seconds into this video, where the bearings are driven out of a plastic wheel. You’ll have to hit harder than this to drive them out of the titanium fork.
I hope that gives an adequate feel for the process. Catch the edge of the back side of the inner bearing race with a screwdriver. Tap with as much vigor as necessary to move the bearing. Move the screwdriver from side-to-side on the bearing to help keep it aligned within the bore. Keep tapping until the bearing drops out.
Remove the c-clip. And do the same thing to the other bearing.
Clean up, grease up, test the fork axle.
Clean any gunk out of the inside of the fork. It is particularly important to make sure there is absolutely nothing stuck in the “corner” of the bottom of the hole.
Why is that important? Above you see the c-clip groove, inside the fork. The first bearing you put in must be driven completely below that groove. Then you place the c-clip in that groove. Then you drive the second bearing into the rest of the space. If the first bearing doesn’t sit absolutely flat on the bottom of the hole, you won’t be able to get the c-clip in. And that, in turn, prevents you from correctly re-assembling the fork.
Wipe any gunk off the c-clip at this point, as well. Just for good luck.
Coat the inside of the fork with a layer of thin grease. I think lithium grease is what is what is typically recommended. Some say that this helps prevent the bearing from seizing in the fork, so that you can get it out next time. I say it helps lube the bearing going into the fork, because you’re going to need all the help you can get to drive the bearing all the way into the fork.
So spray a little grease in, move it around, then swab it out with a paper towel. You want just the thinnest possible layer of grease.
Test to see if the new bearing will slide over the fork axle. You’ll note that I barely bothered to clean up the axle. In particular, I don’t want a nice shiny raw metal surface on that axle, because that just invites corrosion. Leave it alone if you can. The only thing that matters is that the new bearing can be slid over it. Assuming it does, slide the new bearing off, and apply a thin layer of grease over the fork axle. Wipe off any excess with a paper towel.
A brief calculation on freezing the bearing and heating the fork.
I’ve driven bearings like this many times. It’s always a stressful process. I’ve learned to take every advantage I can, if I’m unsure that I can drive the bearing into its housing properly.
Common advice for this next step is to put the bearings in the freezer to cool them, and take a heat gun to the bearing case (the fork, in this case) to heat it. The idea is the take advantage of the coefficient of thermal expansion of metals, and give you a little extra room as you are driving the bearing.
Based on this reference, and my calculation, taking a 1 1/8″ diameter bearing from 70F down to 0F, while heating the titanium housing an equal amount, should increase the clearance for the bearing by almost a thousandth of an inch.
Believe it or not, it is well worth doing that, given that these are more-or-less zero clearance bearings.
If you are unsure of your ability to drive this bearing into this housing, go ahead and take the time to freeze the bearing, and use a hair dryer or heat gun to heat up the fork.
If nothing else, it’ll give you the courage to bang all that much harder at the next step.
BUT THIS COMES WITH A WARNING: WORK FAST. The coefficient of expansion of steels is higher than that of most titanium alloys. The upshot is that if you heat both the titanium fork and the steel bearing, the steel bearing will expand more than the titanium hole. The bearing will actually get tighter, not looser, in that hole. So if you’re going to try this freeze/heat trick, you need to get the bearing seated before it warms up to the temperature of the titanium fork.
As a compromise, you could just freeze the bearing, and leave the fork alone. That will help some, and there’s no harm done if the bearing warms up to room temperature during this process.
Bearing abuse, or using a drift to install the new bearings.
Normally, at this stage, you’d say “installation is the reverse of removal”, and leave it at that.
But in this case, that’s wrong.
To be clear, what you just did to remove the bearing — pounding on the center bearing race — ruins the bearing. At least, if you beat on it hard enough it will. All the force of your hammer blows was transmitted through the “innards” of the bearing, in order to get the outer race to slide along the bore in the fork.
You are NOT going to do that when driving the new bearings back into the fork. Instead, you are going to drive the new bearings by beating on the outer bearing race only. Never on the inner bearing race. That way, the force of your blow is transferred through the steel race directly to the side of the hole. And you are not counting on the “innards” of the bearing to transfer the force of your blows to the outer race.
Clear enough? These bearings come out one way, but they go in in a different way. Beat on the outside race ONLY as you put them back in, because you don’t want to break your brand new bearing.
This is where you need to find a drift for your bearing. A drift is some sort of sturdy hollow metal cylinder that’s just a fraction of a hair smaller in outer diameter than your bearing. The idea is that as you beat the bearing down into the fork, using the drift, it only beats on the outer bearing race, and does not press on any of the “innards” of the bearing. You can buy sets of drifts in graduated sizes on Amazon. But, typically, you’ll use a socket, out of socket set.
Beating the first bearing flush.
Here are the issues.
First, you’re beating a metal bearing into a metal bearing housing — the fork. That’s going to take quite a bit of force. And the further you beat it into the fork, the harder you have to hit it to move it. So, you start off with taps, and you end up with hammer blows.
Second, until you have the bearing flush with the opening, it’s critical to keep the bearing level — going in evenly all around. Stop every so often and eyeball the bearing. If it’s high on one side, tap that side down, and then carry on. So, center the bearing on the opening, nice and level, and start with gentle taps — on the outer race only. (If you have a brass-faced hammer, this would be a good use for it. I used a steel carpenter’s hammer.)
Eventually, you’ll get the bearing driven flush. That’s when you need to center the drift on top of the bearing, and start pounding it home. No more tap-tap-tap. At this step, it’s bang-bang-bang. You must drive this all the way to the bottom of the hole or you won’t be able to re-assemble the fork correctly.
Once you have the first bearing driven home, use your c-clip pliers (and fingers, and screwdrivers) to get the c-clip firmly seated in the groove. There are no style points here — however you can get the clip to seat in the groove, that’s fine. Note that once the clip is correctly in the groove, almost all the clip is hidden.
Finally, drive the second bearing in flush with the surface of the fork. Same process as the start of the first bearing, being sure to tap-bang only on the outer bearing race.
Pat your self on the back if the result looks like this. The outer race is flush all around. And nothing is obviously broken.
.
You’re done
Slide the fork onto the fork axle, put on the washer and retaining lock nut. Tighten the lock nut just enough to keep the fork from rattling.
And you’re done.
If all this pounding on expensive metal parts is off-putting, consider using bearing puller/press designed for this size of bearing. For sure, if I did this routinely, that’s what I would do.
An end-note on cheap bearings
I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videos on this topic, and I’ve seen a lot of people do things to sealed bearings that they really shouldn’t. Take the seals off and grease them. Change just one of a pair of bearings, because only one was thoroughly worn out. Pop a bearing out of its fitting and put it back in the same fitting. I have also seen my wheelchair-using friend hesitate to change bearings, or wait until the bearings are obviously worn.
All of this arises, I think, from the notion that these bearings are somehow precious. If a set of bearings for your caster wheels is $40, you might think about taking some non-recommended steps to try to prolong their life.
And that, in turn, derives from the ludicrous prices charged for these commodity bearings by DME suppliers.
Hence the importance of the just-prior post.
You can easily buy commodity steel sealed bearings, in sizes to fit wheelchair fittings, for around $1 each. Sealed bearings are designed to be disposable. They are not designed to be serviced. And at $1 each, it’s no hardship to treat them as the disposables that they are.
This is Part 1 of a series of posts about replacing the fork bearings on a TiLite Aero wheelchair.
In this post, I only describe the “teardown” part of the process. That is, getting the forks off the chair. The removal and replacement of the bearings is for Part 2.
If you didn’t realize this repair might involve a complicated “teardown” step, and you were thinking of doing this repair yourself, then this post has done its job.
On this particular chair I ran into a worst-case scenario: The steel fork bearings had rusted solidly to the steel axles that they spin around. This stops you from removing the forks from the chair, which you need to do, in order to get to the fork bearings. Your choices are a) replace a few hundred dollars of wheelchair hardware, or b) break the bearings free from the steel axle that the bearing races are rusted to.
This step took several rounds of heating the axles with a propanetorch, spraying with lube, then pounding and prying until the rusted-on bearings broke loose.
Edit: You can see an alternative way to beat on the axle in this reference. There, the user removed the fork axle from its fitting first (i.e., took the fork axle off the wheelchair, fork and all), then beat the axle out of the fork. That’s a smarter approach than what I did. At the minimum, it shows that I’m not the only one have the problem of fork bearings that rusted solidly to the axle they sit on.
Other than spending a couple of hours doing that, the repair went smoothly.
The only practical takeaway isthat before you buy new bearings, bearing puller, bearing press, and so on — first try to remove your forks from the wheelchair.
If they come off readily — once you have removed any retaining hardware — move on to the next post,where I talk about options for replacement bearings, in some detail.
But if the forks don’t come off, even with a bit of lubricant and some gentle persuasion, then ponder just how hard you are willing to hammer on a wheelchair.
My lesson is that, even thought this repair eventually succeeded, I got lucky. With those fork bearing races rusted to the axle, it could just as easily have ended up with an unusable wheelchair, and a few hundred dollars plus a wait for replacement forks and fork axle assemblies.
Not a typo, unfortunately. And, even more unfortunately, planned for my sleepy suburban street.
And not even “a” sidewalk. For that paltry sum, we get two half-sidewalks, on opposite sides of the street. That, together with a new mid-block crosswalk, is TOV government’s answer to the Town Council directive to “put a sidewalk” on my street.
I am going to take a couple of posts to tell the story of this, as I see it.
But, to cut to the chase, the punchline involves ~$2.5 million in free COVIDmoney that the Town picked up. Which has now become use-it-or-lose-it COVID money.
Which, I think, explains the Town’s decision to fire the money cannon at my street. Mostly. The terrain is also difficult in spots.
To cut to the final chase, I’m going to make the case that this is poor value. And, that this is unsurprising, given that the process by which the Town is spending a free $2.5 million has little focus on value to the citizens. I don’t believe the Town is deaf. It may respond if you complain. But that’s not the same as a value-focused planning process.
Anyway, this will be the story of how my Town is getting rid of $2.5M before it evaporates providing better pedestrian safety along Glen Ave SW.
It’s going to take a few posts to tell this. This is not my idea of fun.
FWIW, my sole written comment to the engineer in charge of this is that he produce one sidewalk, on one side of the street or the other.
Part of this series of posts is to try to explain why I think he won’t or can’t do that.
First things first: Could I literally pave this street with money, for that price?
Answer: Sure. In the sense of tiling the surface of the existing asphalt with U.S. currency.
A piece of U.S. paper currency covers about 16 square inches. (Bills are a bit over 6″ x 2.5″). Therefore $2.5M in $1 bills would cover (2,500,000 x 16 / 144 =~) 260,000 square feet. The street in question is about 25 feet wide and maybe 1400 feet long, so it’s (25 * 1400 = ) 35,000 square feet.
For $2.5M I could pave (tile) my street with a 50/50 mix of $5 and $10 bills.
My point is not (just) to be a wise-ass, but to get a kind of gut-check on this. There’s a lot of streets in Vienna that have nothing for sidewalks. Town staff show an almost complete reluctance to spend local taxpayer money on sidewalks. (Preferring to wait for grants, I guess, no matter how slow that process.)
My only point is that my gut tells me this is a lot of money to spend, for so little additional functionality to the citizens. In a Town that is far from lavish about spending it’s own taxpayers’ money on sidewalks.
So I’m going to take a couple of posts-to-be to analyze the situation. As I see it. FWIW.
Yesterday morning, while out for a bike ride, I ran over the above-pictured push-pin, in the parking lot of a park. Despite its small size, it had no problem going right through the tread of my bike’s rear tire.
Mirabile dictu, I was able to get home before the tire went fully flat.
As my reward, I spent the next hour replacing the tube in my rear tire. But at least I could cuss and sweat on my own back porch, instead of at the side of the road.
They say you never forget how to ride a bike. But you surely can forget how to fix one. The whole affair was a bit of a learning experience.
1: Changing the tube in my back tire made me feel like a kid again.
Barely competent, and unsure of my ability to get by in the world.
But perhaps your childhood differed from mine.
In any case, I can still change a rear bike tire all by myself. There was a fair bit of head-scratching involved, due to the unusual construction and tight clearances of my semi-recumbent bike.
But, in the end, I replaced the inner tube without breaking anything.
Except the Third Commandment. (Or Second, depending on what you consider to be the theologically-correct numbering system.)
When it comes to moving rusty nuts and bolts, I consider a liberal amount of swearing to be at least as helpful as a liberal dosing with penetrating oil. Neither one actually affects the rusted parts, they just give you the courage to twist harder on those parts than you otherwise would.
And, in any case, God seems to treat the breaking of Commandments much as our judicial system treats crimes by the rich and powerful. The penalties for transgression are theoretical in nature, and if they occur, will happen so far in the distant future that they provide no practical deterrent to behavior in the present.
So, overall, it was a win. This push-pin cut my bike ride short, but I confirmed that I can replace a bike inner tube using only the tools I routinely carry when I bike.
This minor random mishap reminded me of the events discussed in Post #1853, linked above, regarding a young woman who was killed while bicycling in a Maryland bike lane. A truck turned right, across the bike lane, and ran into her. Five seconds sooner, or five seconds later, and she’d have had no problem.
Similarly, this particular tire puncture depended on an almost comically improbable series of events. Within my randomly-chosen bike route, across the entire width of an empty parking lot, a half-inch to either side and I’d have missed that push-pin.
But if you bike enough miles, you’ll run into your share of punctures.
And, like clockwork, about 1,000 bicyclists a year die in accidents in the U.S. Year in, year out.
It’s a fair bet that each and every one of them was surprised by it. Yet the overall rate remains rock-steady.
Weirdly, the flip side of that combination — the improbability of any one event, yet the stability of an average rate of such events — is that I must be having near-misses all the time. Hundreds of tacks that I passed by but didn’t run over, for every one that I did.
And, correspondingly, accidents that would have happened but for a few minutes’ or seconds’ difference here or there.
It’s just the way it is. You’ll typically never know how lucky you were.
May the odds be ever in your favor.
3: The psychological benefits from owning emergency supplies that have quietly gone bad.
After I had put a new tube in that tire, I decided to patch the old one and keep that for a spare. Rather than haul myself to the bike store for a new tube. And as a consequence of that, I corrected a misunderstanding that I had had since I was a kid.
I thought that an un-opened metal tube of tire patch glue would last forever.
I was off by roughly infinity minus four years. The tube of glue in my patch kit appeared pristine and flexible, but the solvent had evaporated long ago. The tube of glue looked and felt perfect. Still flexible, no leaks. Only when I punctured the spout and squeezed did I realize that it had joined the choir invisible some years before. Nothing came out.
Now that I look in detail at bike tube patch kits, the shelf life of an unopened tube of rubber cement is maybe four years, when stored outside.
The upshot is that I had been carrying around a useless patch kit for years.
Or, more likely, decades, given the indirect evidence. My econometric clock says that I likely purchased this patch kit some time around the turn of century. My kit, with a price tag of $3, currently sells for $5 and change on Amazon.
The fact that this was clearly purchased at a bricks-and-mortar retailer is just another blast from the past. One with price stickers, yet. They were a thing. Look it up if you don’t believe me.
And yet, until today, carrying that patch kit on my bike gave me a sense of security.
Which means that, oddly enough, I was better off carrying a useless patch kit than carrying no kit at all.
To be clear, if I’d known I had no way to patch a flat, I’d have been worried. But with a (useless) patch kit on board, I never gave flat tires a second thought.
The unfortunate answer is, because I’m old. And, like so many things, technology changed when I wasn’t paying attention.
The unusable patch kit was a wet-glue patch, requiring application of liquid contact cement (or rubber cement or sometimes a mysterious “vulcanizing fluid”), plus a peel-n-stick patch. Patching inner tubes this way — gluing on a bit of rubber using rubber cement — goes back at least a century.
But now, there are so-called pre-glued patches, where no wet glue is required. Just peel-n-stick.
As it turns out, I owned both types of repair kits, from the same manufacturer (Park Tool). Unlike the wet-glue kit, pre-glued patch kits remain good almost indefinitely. My pre-glued patches were still good, and ultimately I patched the tube using a pre-glued patch.
Pre-glued patches are also faster and easier to use. Lightly sand the area around the hole clean, peel-n-stick, and press firmly into place. (The Park Tool patches are clear. This makes it easy to chase any air bubbles out from under the patch.)
Plus, there are no fumes, no messy glue, no waiting for the glue to dry or cure. No short-lived tubes of glue, period.
So that raises an obvious question: If pre-glued patches are faster, easier, and have a longer shelf life, why do wet-glued inner tube patches still exist?
The internet tells me that old-style wet-glued patches are viewed as permanent, while pre-glued patches are viewed as temporary. They are expected to leak, eventually. So if you want to fix your inner tube permanently, you need to use a wet (rubber-cement-style) patch.
OK, why even bother to patch a bicycle inner tube? (Other than for expediency, I mean — for the second or later flat occurring on a given bike ride. Assuming you carry a spare inner tube when you bike.)
Answer: Once up on a time, a bicycle inner tube was an expensive piece of equipment. Here’s the entry from the 1918 Sears and Roebuck catalog. The roughly $1 standard inner tube of that day equates to over $22 today. So, back when wet-patching tubes was the norm, an inner tube would have made a rather expensive disposable item.
Back in the modern world, I can pick up a replacement inner tube on Amazon for $5. Or less than the cost of a single-use wet-glue patch kit. Based on how frequently I have bike flats, and the short shelf life of the glue in a wet-patch kit, it’s actually cheaper for me to throw the tube away, than to buy and use a new wet patch kit every time I have a flat. (New, because the glue will most definitely go bad after a short while, once the tube has been opened.)
Conclusion: Time to join the modern world.
The upshot of this post is that my whole approach to flats on a bike was outmoded. I carry a spare tube. In addition, I should carry some pre-glued patches as a backup.
At the rate at which I get flats, it never did make sense to carry a wet-glue patch kit. Not even a fresh one, that would actually work. I just didn’t realize it until I tried to use the long-deceased kit that I had been faithfully carrying on my bike since roughly the turn of the century.
Alternatively, I’ve looked into modern tire sealants such as Slime (r) and similar. They get mixed reviews, and they may have limited effectiveness in high-pressure tires. But the worst part is that bike tire sealants have a shorter shelf life than a wet-patch kit. Slime (and other self-sealing tubes) recommend replacing the tube every two years.
And I know what that means. If I went to the trouble to install self-sealing tubes, I would undoubtedly treat it as a one-and-done. So that when I had a flat, N years from now, they would no longer work.
Much the same as my wet-patch kit.
Sometimes the right solution isn’t about the technology, it’s about eliminating the potential for operator error.
Extras for Experts 1: My wife’s solution to a bicycle flat tire.
So here I am, trying to drag my thinking out of last century, abandoning wet-patch kits for flat bike tires.
I made the mistake of asking my wife what she would like me to do with the repair kit on her bike.
Because, you know, you’d hate to be stranded by a flat, miles from home.
She looked at me like I was a moron, pulled out her phone, and gave me the one-word answer above.
Apparently my brain has not fully absorbed the development of cell phones. Because in this entire process, that option never even occurred to me.
In any case, the lesson here is that a flat bike tire, in an urban area, miles from home, is hardly the disaster it was in decades past.
Extras for Experts 2: Primordial Slime
I thought that Fix-a-Flat, Slime, and similar leak-stopping chemicals were a modern invention.
Not so, per the same Sears catalog referenced above. They’ve been around since at least the WWI era.
Even stranger, this ancient Slime(r)-equivalent advertised leak-stopping fibers, exactly as some Slime products do today. Except that in 1918, the fibers were proudly noted as being asbestos.
I never thought I’d say that. Not in my lifetime. Not unironically.
But, truly, it could not have been easier. I had to renew my license in person, if for no other reason than to have my vision tested. I made an appointment on-line, followed the instructions, and the DMV worked like a well-oiled yet seemingly-people-friendly machine.
Total time at the DMV? Seventeen minutes, car-door-to-car-door.
Not like it was in the good (?) old days, that’s for sure. But the VA DMV has been on a roll for decades now, in terms of streamlining service delivery and doing as much business as possible over the internet rather than in person.
The DMV even threw in the upgrade to RealID. For a slightly higher fee. Hate the concept. Took them up on the offer anyway.
This is not to say that I am a pushover when it comes to upselling. I declined the RealID subcutaneous RFID implant, even though the additional fee was quite modest. Maybe I’ll go for that when I get my passport renewed.
In any case, I still see well enough to drive. I’m still able to bumble my way through a DMV visit.
Guess that makes this a good day. I should enjoy the now.
My next mandatory license renewal is in 2032. Logically, I recognize that number as a year that will occur eight years from now. But it otherwise lacks reality to me. Might as well be forever and a day.
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