2manyoranges
Old School Grand Master
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I went into Decathlon in Cambridge this week (never a great experience, but needs must) and I was shocked at the huge box which triumphantly announced that ‘we recycle all our inner tubes’ - which contained hundreds, yes, hundreds of tubes - most of which could be patched without any problem at all. Perfectly useable. Scary waste.
Before the advent of tubeless, our inner tubes would only go in the recycling when you could no longer stick patches on the patches. TipTop tiny patches...excellent and still use them...and TipTop cement. Great stuff.
South Downs 1993...I remember a friend who was aghast at the tube I pulled out after a flat - more patches than a tube patch shop. But off came the wheel, bish bosh, off came one side of the the nice, loose-fitting Specialized Ground Control, out comes the old tube, rippety rip, fingers quickly around to check nothing in the tyre, replacement patch-ridden tube in, tyre on, pumpetty pump....two minutes dead. His jaw was on the floor. ‘Blimey that was quick...’...and then we were off on the trail once more...
...However, in contrast I do remember long sessions when a sun baked thorn had broken its tip in the tyre, impossible to detect, but blowing the tube each time it was patched and inserted - much frustration...
But back to The Point Of This Thread...does anyone know how to apply a patch these days? Or is it all ‘puncture...new tube...in the bin with the old...’? I actually quite like the craft process of mending a tube - in the sun by the side of the trail when we are idling along, or back at home in the warm after a rapid change out in the wild. Young people seem not to be inducted into the puncture-repair process anymore, and shops have an interest in adding the cost of a new tube to the price of a puncture-fix. All this concern about the environment, yet simple things like repairing tubes seem to be more victims of the ‘disposable economy’....
And the clean, scuff, smear, peel, stick, dust process of a good patch repair is a lot better than wrangling a tube into a tubeless set-up after a unsealable arterial burst and dealing with the gallons of slime over everything....but that’s another story...
Before the advent of tubeless, our inner tubes would only go in the recycling when you could no longer stick patches on the patches. TipTop tiny patches...excellent and still use them...and TipTop cement. Great stuff.
South Downs 1993...I remember a friend who was aghast at the tube I pulled out after a flat - more patches than a tube patch shop. But off came the wheel, bish bosh, off came one side of the the nice, loose-fitting Specialized Ground Control, out comes the old tube, rippety rip, fingers quickly around to check nothing in the tyre, replacement patch-ridden tube in, tyre on, pumpetty pump....two minutes dead. His jaw was on the floor. ‘Blimey that was quick...’...and then we were off on the trail once more...
...However, in contrast I do remember long sessions when a sun baked thorn had broken its tip in the tyre, impossible to detect, but blowing the tube each time it was patched and inserted - much frustration...
But back to The Point Of This Thread...does anyone know how to apply a patch these days? Or is it all ‘puncture...new tube...in the bin with the old...’? I actually quite like the craft process of mending a tube - in the sun by the side of the trail when we are idling along, or back at home in the warm after a rapid change out in the wild. Young people seem not to be inducted into the puncture-repair process anymore, and shops have an interest in adding the cost of a new tube to the price of a puncture-fix. All this concern about the environment, yet simple things like repairing tubes seem to be more victims of the ‘disposable economy’....
And the clean, scuff, smear, peel, stick, dust process of a good patch repair is a lot better than wrangling a tube into a tubeless set-up after a unsealable arterial burst and dealing with the gallons of slime over everything....but that’s another story...