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.
Source: Wikipedia.
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.
That was a nice surprise.
2: Inevitable surprise
Post #1853: Urban bicycling really is as dangerous as it looks.
Bit of an oxymoron, that.
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.
Rabbits’ feet. Amulets. Lucky charms. Inner tube patch kits.
It’s all about the power of belief.
4: Why do I even have a wet-glue tube patch kit?
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.
Source: Sears 1918 catalog is currently accessible from https://christmas.musetechnical.com/
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.
