overmind
My other bike is a Pinarello
- Location
- Reading, Berkshire
I find this thread a bit depressing.
I grew up watching my brothers tinkering with bikes. I must have seen them fixing punctures hundreds of times. I am not sure I absorbed much else but fixing a puncture was about as basic as it got. I do vaguely remember when I was really small asking my big brother to fix it for me but from watching him it was pretty obvious how to do it. The hardest thing, as a small child, would be to get the tyre off and finding the cause of the puncture.
We used to use patch kits but I have read stuff online where people just used to use bits of old inner-tube as patches. It seems it worked almost as well. I guess all they ever needed to replace was rubber solution. Tyre levers used to be metal so were basically indestructible; I think some even used household spoons and forks.
I would recommend anybody to learn to fix a puncture as a bare minimum. If you are not prepared to do this I would recommend you get Marathon+ tyres (or equivalent) and/or tyre liners.
I have a theory that many adults ride fixed gear bikes because they cannot handle dealing with the potential problems of derailleur type gears (the most common one being re-indexing the gear occasionally).
Halfords charge £25 to repair a puncture. I could buy a new Marathon+ tyre for that!
I used to use cure-e-cure patches but am a recent convert to something called weldtite patch strip. I keep something called Hemline thread snips (from sewing) in my repair kit and just cut the patch to the size I need. In the old cure-e-cure kits I used to use up all the small patches and just be left with only the big ones. This patch strip solution does not have that problem (kind of a-la-carte patches).
</rant over>
I grew up watching my brothers tinkering with bikes. I must have seen them fixing punctures hundreds of times. I am not sure I absorbed much else but fixing a puncture was about as basic as it got. I do vaguely remember when I was really small asking my big brother to fix it for me but from watching him it was pretty obvious how to do it. The hardest thing, as a small child, would be to get the tyre off and finding the cause of the puncture.
We used to use patch kits but I have read stuff online where people just used to use bits of old inner-tube as patches. It seems it worked almost as well. I guess all they ever needed to replace was rubber solution. Tyre levers used to be metal so were basically indestructible; I think some even used household spoons and forks.
I would recommend anybody to learn to fix a puncture as a bare minimum. If you are not prepared to do this I would recommend you get Marathon+ tyres (or equivalent) and/or tyre liners.
I have a theory that many adults ride fixed gear bikes because they cannot handle dealing with the potential problems of derailleur type gears (the most common one being re-indexing the gear occasionally).
Halfords charge £25 to repair a puncture. I could buy a new Marathon+ tyre for that!
I used to use cure-e-cure patches but am a recent convert to something called weldtite patch strip. I keep something called Hemline thread snips (from sewing) in my repair kit and just cut the patch to the size I need. In the old cure-e-cure kits I used to use up all the small patches and just be left with only the big ones. This patch strip solution does not have that problem (kind of a-la-carte patches).
</rant over>
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