Quoted message said:Quoted message said:
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.bicycles.tech/msg/e37844d420b29220
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
