It held air

Yesterday, I noticed a trace of green Slime in a hole in my rear tire.

But the tire was holding air, so I told myself that it was just
left-over slime from a previous flat, not from a new puncture.

Today, the tire still held air, but my pre-flight check forced me to
revise my theory:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2mzk66f.jpg
http://i29.tinypic.com/2j1r690.jpg

The pump and gauge aren't attached to the valve--the pump handle was
just a handy stand to hang the wheel.

The tire probably would have worked fine, but I pulled the tube for
patching, put in another, and chalked up my 14th flat for 2008.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Thu, 03 Apr 2008 07:53:04 -0700, Colin Campbell
wrote:

wrote:
Yesterday, I noticed a trace of green Slime in a hole in my rear tire.

But the tire was holding air, so I told myself that it was just
left-over slime from a previous flat, not from a new puncture.

Today, the tire still held air, but my pre-flight check forced me to
revise my theory:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2mzk66f.jpg
http://i29.tinypic.com/2j1r690.jpg

The pump and gauge aren't attached to the valve--the pump handle was
just a handy stand to hang the wheel.

The tire probably would have worked fine, but I pulled the tube for
patching, put in another, and chalked up my 14th flat for 2008.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

Boy, you bettah find yo'self a road to ride on!

Fourteen flats in 93 days - congratulations. No wait, I think I mean
commiseration.

Dear Colin,

What do you mean, find a road? It's all nicely paved, about nine miles
of road and six miles of path.

There's even [modest cough] a traffic light with non-functioning
traffic cameras.

Alas, my daily ride isn't quite as daily as I'd like in the winter, so
it's technically fourteen flats in only 83 rides.

Usually the cause is goathead thorns, though the holes in the pictures
are from something larger--glass, rock chips, russian olive thorns, or
metal debris ranging from nails to cotter pins to fish-hooks.

Sometimes I wonder uneasily if holes like the ones in this picture are
quite as normal as I think they a
http://i29.tinypic.com/2j1r690.jpg

I took a dozen toothpicks and stuck them through similar holes in an
earlier ti
http://i32.tinypic.com/f1lhdf.jpg

There were more holes, but a dozen toothpicks seemed like enough.
Reassuringly, the replies to that post didn't seem to indicate that
the holes were unusual:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...3c5a10890f242f

So far, it's been a good year in that most of my flats have been
repaired comfortably at home rather than on the road. I like my Topeak
Road Morph pump, but I like my floor pump and work bench better.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Apr 3, 11:56*am, wrote:
Usually the cause is goathead thorns, though the holes in the pictures
are from something larger--glass, rock chips, russian olive thorns, or
metal debris ranging from nails to cotter pins to fish-hooks.

So, maybe we've been over this all before, but what have you got
against
Mr. Tuffy? Slime gets all over. I have Mr. Tuffies in all of my
bikes
(well, one bike has a knockoff made by Slime, but it's not slime-
filled,
it's just a plastic armor strip), and goathead punctures never get me
anymore.

On Apr 3, 1:07*pm, wrote:
On Apr 3, 11:56*am, wrote:

Usually the cause is goathead thorns, though the holes in the pictures
are from something larger--glass, rock chips, russian olive thorns, or
metal debris ranging from nails to cotter pins to fish-hooks.

So, maybe we've been over this all before, but what have you got
against
Mr. Tuffy? *Slime gets all over. *I have Mr. Tuffies in all of my
bikes
(well, one bike has a knockoff made by Slime, but it's not slime-
filled,
it's just a plastic armor strip), and goathead punctures never get me
anymore.

Dear Chris,

I have no objection to Mr. Tuffies. Some people like them.

But years ago I still had goathead flats with Mr. Tuffies and thicker
thorn-resistant tubes. The plastic strips sometimes made roadside
repairs more troublesome.

Plastic strips and thorn-resistant tube don't protect well against
thorns off the center of the tread like this:

http://i18.tinypic.com/2gtpxd2.jpg

http://i16.tinypic.com/44td0dx.jpg

Plastic strips also increase rolling resistance noticeably. My times
improved markedly when I switched to Slime tubes.

As for any mess, even the result of a rim blow-off cleans up with a
quick swipe or two of the hand, wiped off on the nearest weeds:

http://i18.tinypic.com/4t9hswg.jpg

I'm willing to put up with a few drops of slime in exchange for
getting home about half the time without stopping to fix a flat and
for finding two or three sealed holes in a tube when it finally goes
flat.

I don't know of anything other than solid tires that really works
around here, but the rolling resistance is more than I'm willing to
put up with.

So I like Slime tubes better than anything that I've tried, you're
happier with plastic strips, and Lewis likes solid airfree tires:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...7844d420b29220

There are other solutions, too.

I pass a lot of riders around here who are riding MTB bikes with
knobby tires on pavement. With the knobs, the actual tire sits high
off the ground, well away from most goatheads.

But I also often see them pushing their bikes with flat knobby tires
and what turn out to be thicker thorn-resistant tubes. It only takes
one goathead.

(And those MTB riders pedal past me when I'm yanking a tube and
pumping up the new one by the side of the path or road.)

I also pedal past riders tucking plastic strips back into road tires.

In the summer, I sometimes meet puzzled riders on touring bikes with
flats in the thick industrial tires often recommended here. A few of
them have volunteered that it was the first flat they'd had since they
left California.

As an aside, rolling resistance is a points often confused in bicycle
history.

Dunlop didn't pursue the pneumatic tire for comfort, though it
certainly made a huge difference.

Dunlop's first test showed that a pneumatic tire rolled far better
than a solid tire across a barn yard, so he worked on the idea,
persuaded some racers to try pneumatics, and succeeded because they
soon beat riders with traditional solid and cushion tires so badly
that anyone using the pneumatics was forced to ride with a handicap.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Apr 3, 1:54*pm, wrote:

So I like Slime tubes better than anything that I've tried, you're
happier with plastic strips, and Lewis likes solid airfree tires:
*http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...7844d420b29220

There are other solutions, too.

Carl...when my wife and son and I last rode together last summer we
went through an unfamiliar, shady (low visibility) stretch. My son
picked up no less than 14 goatheads on his knobbies. My wife caught
about 8 in the fat balloony tires I put on her bike. I had...NONE.
Put Slime-liners in his, Tuffies in hers, and I continued to ride
naked, so to speak. What's my point? I don't know, maybe some people
are lucky, some aren't. It seems that when it comes to goats, I'm
lucky, when it comes to marauding Chevy Silverados...not so much.
ABS

On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 16:41:45 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Apr 3, 1:54*pm, wrote:

So I like Slime tubes better than anything that I've tried, you're
happier with plastic strips, and Lewis likes solid airfree tires:
*http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...7844d420b29220

There are other solutions, too.

Carl...when my wife and son and I last rode together last summer we
went through an unfamiliar, shady (low visibility) stretch. My son
picked up no less than 14 goatheads on his knobbies. My wife caught
about 8 in the fat balloony tires I put on her bike. I had...NONE.
Put Slime-liners in his, Tuffies in hers, and I continued to ride
naked, so to speak. What's my point? I don't know, maybe some people
are lucky, some aren't. It seems that when it comes to goats, I'm
lucky, when it comes to marauding Chevy Silverados...not so much.
ABS

Dear Alan,

Sheer luck can easily explain it.

For example, your son might have rolled right across a goathead vine
on the edge of the road. Your wife took a line two feet away from the
edge and missed most of it. You missed it completely because you were
four feet from the edge.

Another explanation involves tire styles and widths.

Knobby tires tend to pick up and show goatheads. They're often about
twice as wide as road tires, so they sweep a greater path, and the
thorns can stick in three of the four sides of each knob, often
without harming anything. (It's darned rare for a goathead to stick in
the trailing face of a knob.)

Big balloon tires suffer more for similar reasons. They sweep a wider
path than high-pressure road tires, so they pick up more debris, and
the lower pressure makes them less likely to break the thorns off.

High pressure road tires sweep the narrowest path. They also have a
smaller effective shoulder and edge than knobbies and squashy balloon
tires, so they miss more of the goatheads that stick into the sides of
the other tires.

And narrow, high-pressure road tires often break the thorns off,
leaving just the tips embedded. You don't see the tips unless they
pierce the tube and you're looking for them.

(Or unless you habitually give your tires a slow spin with the bike
upside-down before a ride, peering at the rubber from a few inches
away and prying the tiny thorns out with the end of a paper-clip.)

But luck has a way of evening out, as casinos know. Whether your ride
is 15 miles long, across the country, or just down to the corner,
you're likely to hit a goathead if there are just a hundred random
thorns scattered somewhere along your 8-foot wide potential path,
since that's about 100 inches wide and your two tires sweep at least a
1-inch wide effective path.

Not every goathead that you hit will puncture a tube--many thorns have
both tips on the ground and are harmless, lots of tips break off
instead of penetrating, and others go in at an angle and aren't long
enough to hurt anything but the tread.

Slime tubes confuse things even more. When I take the tube I patched
yesterday off the anvil-arm that I use for patching, I'll pump it up
and look for other punctures--slime can seal a few holes before the
tire finally goes flat.

In fact, I'll go check it now . . .
http://i31.tinypic.com/904keu.jpg

Drat! Good thing I check after I patch. About 20 pumps with an old
mini-pump stretches the tube enough to reveal most of the previously
hidden holes.

The glue should be just about tacky by now for the second patch. And
I'll check the stupid tube again tomorrow evening, in case a third
pinhole shows up.

So far this century, I'm averaging about one flat every ten rides, or
one successful goathead every 150 miles. I have patches when I'm
flatting several times a week, then patches when I'm going a whole
month without a flat, but the average is around 33 flats per year,
with around 330 rides per year.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

On Apr 3, 6:52 pm, wrote:
On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 16:41:45 -0700 (PDT), wrote:
On Apr 3, 1:54 pm, wrote:

So I like Slime tubes better than anything that I've tried, you're
happier with plastic strips, and Lewis likes solid airfree tires:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...7844d420b29220

Fair enough. I don't have the trouble with floppy strips that you
cite; in my experience, after a couple dozen miles, the Tuffies are
"seated" and tend to stay put, as long as you just pop one bead off
the rim when replacing.

Which you never need to do, because they are like the stone that
repels tigers for me. That point was driven home when I bought a new
bike with 700x32-ish tires and suffered two goathead flats in the
first week. That was last September, and I've had one flat since
then, which was caused by a large staple.

I have two other wide-tire road bikes (26x1.5 and 700x37) that behave
similarly. I also have a mountain bike (26x2-ish) that I run
*without* Tuffies, but *with* thorn resistant tubes as an extra
measure against pinch flats because I am a gentleman of gravity. I
have never encountered a goathead on the trail.

I can't believe they actually doubled your ride time, but I'd be
interested to hear what the delta actually was if you have any
figures. As a commuter, my bigger concern is their impact on traction
when cornering.

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 05:26:28 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

[snip]

I can't believe they actually doubled your ride time, but I'd be
interested to hear what the delta actually was if you have any
figures. As a commuter, my bigger concern is their impact on traction
when cornering.

Dear Chris,

I can't figure out where that "doubled ride time" came from, but I'd
be interested to hear why a commuter is worried about traction on
cornering.

:-)

Cheers,

Carl Fogel

wrote:
On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 05:26:28 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

[snip]

I can't believe they actually doubled your ride time, but I'd be
interested to hear what the delta actually was if you have any
figures. As a commuter, my bigger concern is their impact on traction
when cornering.

Dear Chris,

I can't figure out where that "doubled ride time" came from, but I'd
be interested to hear why a commuter is worried about traction on
cornering.

Oh, I know, I know! It helps avoid falling down and going boom.

Mark J.

On Fri, 4 Apr 2008 05:26:28 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Apr 3, 6:52 pm, wrote:
On Thu, 3 Apr 2008 16:41:45 -0700 (PDT), wrote:
On Apr 3, 1:54 pm, wrote:

So I like Slime tubes better than anything that I've tried, you're
happier with plastic strips, and Lewis likes solid airfree tires:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.b...7844d420b29220

Fair enough. I don't have the trouble with floppy strips that you
cite; in my experience, after a couple dozen miles, the Tuffies are
"seated" and tend to stay put, as long as you just pop one bead off
the rim when replacing.

Which you never need to do, because they are like the stone that
repels tigers for me. That point was driven home when I bought a new
bike with 700x32-ish tires and suffered two goathead flats in the
first week. That was last September, and I've had one flat since
then, which was caused by a large staple.

I have two other wide-tire road bikes (26x1.5 and 700x37) that behave
similarly. I also have a mountain bike (26x2-ish) that I run
*without* Tuffies, but *with* thorn resistant tubes as an extra
measure against pinch flats because I am a gentleman of gravity. I
have never encountered a goathead on the trail.

I can't believe they actually doubled your ride time, but I'd be
interested to hear what the delta actually was if you have any
figures. As a commuter, my bigger concern is their impact on traction
when cornering.

Dear Chris,

Here's a crude elapsed-time chart, with a red bar inserted to show
where the change from Tuffy and thorn-resistant to Slime tubes
occurred:
http://i30.tinypic.com/og04eb.jpg

When I switched to Slime tubes from Tuffies and thick thorn-resistant
tubes on 01-08-2000, my average speed rose from 18.87 mph for the
previous ~350 rides to 19.86 mph for the next ~350 rides on the same
daily route, about three minutes faster on a 45~48 minute ride, a bit
over 6% faster.

The speed change was immediate and prolonged, so it's hard to argue
that it was a new-toy effect. As usual, times grew longer at the end
of both years with bad weather.

As for traction, I'd be surprised if a commuter could notice any
difference due to Tuffy strips.

Cheers,

Carl Fogel