On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 3/1/2003
Riding On Air
Sometimes when I see a cyclist struggling with a flat tire on the side of the road, it looks to me to be the very picture of plucky self-reliance. Other times, it just looks pathetic. Usually, the latter impression is the one I get when the cyclist on the side of the road is me.
So far, in this new year of 2003, struggling with flats has been my fate altogether too often. This has been the Winter of Flats for me, with at least 15 so far in less than two months, including no less than four rides with double flats. One flat in a ride is a pain. Two is more than twice as bad. The first one is relatively easy to fix--just throw in your spare tube--but if you carry only one spare tube, as I do, the second flat will require a roadside repair session: pump up the tube, find the hole, put on the glue, let it set, apply the patch, etc. Time consuming and tedious.
The first double flat ride I had last month was especially painful for me. I was riding to the start of a Saturday club ride. I had timed it all out carefully so I would arrive right when everyone was ready to go. I quickly swapped out the first punctured tube with my spare, and figured I could still make the ride. The second one killed off any hope of that, but wait: it gets worse. When I took out my tube of glue, I discovered the glue had all dried up. Forget making it to the ride on time...I wasn’t going anywhere!
There is a twist to this story that makes it even more painful than what you see here, and for that, you need a little background... I’m the Ride Director for the Santa Rosa Cycling Club. I coordinate the monthly ride calendar and do various things to promote club rides. One of my favorite chores is handing out commemorative tire patch kits at the end of the year to all club members who have volunteered to lead rides over the course of the year. Sometime around the holidays, I go into my local bike shop and pretty much buy up their entire inventory of patch kits. I print out Avery labels with a custom Santa Rosa Cycling Club graphic and stick them on all the kits, making them look a little bit special. Then, at our year-end banquet, I hand them out. People always appreciate getting them, and it’s a simple way for the club to say “thank you” to folks for leading rides. I never know quite how many of the ride leaders are going to attend the party, so I make a guess at how many kits to prepare. Typically I will come home from the event with a handful of kits left over, and this year was no exception.
Well, that banquet--and the distribution of the patch kits--had been one week before my two-flat ride. I had handed out something like 50 patch kits, but had neglected to award one to myself. As I stood on the side of the road, looking at my unfixable tire and at my little tube of dessicated glue, an image sprang forcefully to my mind: the half dozen brand new patch kits--with their plump little tubes of gooey glue--sitting on my desk at home. And there I was, a few miles away, on the side of the road, with no way to fix my flat. If that isn’t a pathetic picture, I don’t know what is.
Winter always seems to be bad for flats. We all agree on that, right? Theories abound as to why this is so. Some say it has to do with more debris washing out onto the roads, but this doesn’t make too much sense to me. The kinds of refuse that cause flats--broken beer bottles, little snippets of radial tire wire, assorted thorns--are at least as likely to be present in the summer, and possibly more so. My own half-baked theory is that little bits of junk cling to wet tires a bit more than to dry ones, and just a couple of extra revolutions on the tire will give a sharp point the time it needs to get some bite into the rubber. I have no idea if this theory would stand up to scientific testing, and anyway, most of my flats this winter have come on dry roads.
This rash of recent flats has caused me to contemplate the whole subject of tires and tubes. The pneumatic (or air-filled) tire was introduced by John Boyd Dunlop in 1888, and it represented a seminal moment in the development of the bicycle. Prior to that time, tires were made out of leather (and later solid rubber) attached to a wooden or metal rim. The suspension and road-holding qualities inherent in pneumatic tires revolutionized the sport overnight, transforming what had been a harsh, bone rattling torture into something approaching a silky-smooth, magic carpet ride. I would have to rank it with the “safety” frame geometry and the chain-drive as the most important advances in bike technology of all time.
But of course, that silky-smooth ride comes at a cost: when you’re riding on air, and the air is contained inside a balloon--a tube--sometimes the balloon gets popped and all the air escapes, with a big “kapow!” or a sudden “pssssss!”. Riding on a flat tire is marginally better than riding on a metal rim, but not much better, and you won’t want to do it for long if you like your rims. (I actually know someone who flatted several miles from the end of an important time trial and kept going on the flat...and won the time trial! But this is not recommended.) When we flat, we had best fix the problem immediately. And we hope fixing the flat is the extent of our troubles: a blow-out while traveling at speed--especially a front-wheel blow-out--can have catastrophic consequences.
All in all, I think our tires and tubes are the most vulnerable and perishable of the many parts on our bikes. We spend more money by far replacing these two rubber components--four, if you count each tube and each tire--than we spend on any other aspect of routine bike maintenance. Nothing else “breaks down” as frequently, and nothing else wears out as quickly. I’m talking primarily about road tires on higher-end bikes, those skinny, whisper-light wonders that pump up to 120 psi and roll down the road like the second cousin to flying. Big knobby mountain bike tires and sturdy, thick-walled touring tires are far less prone to flats. And how many flats did you get on the bike you had as a kid, with its heavy, bomb-proof tires? Not many, I’ll bet. (I know I owned a patch kit when I was a kid, but I can’t remember ever using it.) But you know how we all are about our “racing” bikes (even if we never actually race them): we all have that greed for speed. Or perhaps more accurately, we all crave efficiency. We all want our few puny watts of energy outlay translated into the maximum amount of forward motion. Lightweight wheels and low rolling resistence are obvious ways to enhance that efficiency, so we pare our tires down to the absolute minimum wall thickness and pump them up as hard as the manufacturer’s specs will allow, or a little beyond... Having done so, we shouldn’t be surprised if they fail now and then.
In our quest for speed (or efficiency), most of us will draw the line somewhere and refuse to use what we refer to as “stupid-light” parts...components whose structural integrity has been compromised in a quest for weight savings. But we routinely buy tires and tubes that are right at the cutting edge--so to speak--of stupid-light parameters. I mean, we could run clunky touring tires on our racy bikes, or we could insert Tuffy tire liners, but think of the weight! Egads! (I know, many of you do this on your commuter bikes and on your training rims, but almost never on the prime time bike.) Hey, I’m not knocking you for running thin, high-psi tires. I do it too. I love the ride and the handling and the light weight. For all of that, I’m willing to take a chance on the occasional flat...even a hair-raising, downhill, front-wheel flat.
But I often wonder: couldn’t there be a better way? Bikes from the 1890’s don’t look much different from bikes today, including the air-filled tires. But in many subtle ways, the technology has advanced considerably. Think of frame materials. The frames may still look like they did, but they’re made of carbon fiber and double-butted titanium and fancy alloys; the bonding and welding techniques are better, and the result is stronger, stiffer (and yet more resilient), and above all, lighter frames. Ditto for components. But the pneumatic tire of today not only looks the same as one from the 1890’s, it pretty much IS the same in all functionally significant ways. I’m sure the tire manufacturers will cite all sorts of advances in the formulation of the rubber, making it more durable or whatever, but the changes are of a tiny order of improvement. We’re really still using the same tires our great-grandparents used.
You would think, with all the wonderful and sometimes alarming things they can do with chemistry these days, the folks at Dupont or Goodyear or Dunlop could come up with a rubber that combines great ride and handling with serious durability. Why not a solid tire made of some sort of lightweight foam rubber? Is it too much to expect that in the almost 120-year existence of the pneumatic bike tire, we might have advanced the cause a bit further than this?
I actually recall seeing a solid rubber tire advertised in some non-bike catalog like Sharper Image, but I never tried them, and I don’t know anyone else who ever did, so I’m making the admittedly illogical assumption that, as no one I know is using them, there must be something wrong with them. I am also aware of the existence of products like Slime, which you inject into your tubes, and which, theoretically at least, will seal a puncture and allow you to ride home on what would otherwise be a flat. I have used Slime, and can only say I was not impressed. It made a mess, didn’t work very well, and it filled my tire with something a lot heavier than air. I have recently heard about a new tire liner--I think called Thin Skins, but I’m not sure about that--that is lighter than a Tuffy. I might want to check that out, at least for winter riding.
But tire liners and tube sealants are really just bandaids. I don’t want a bandaid. I want a cure! I want a substantially flat-resistant racing tire that still rides like a high-quality, lightweight clincher or tubular. I want it. You want it. We all want it. And when someone finally develops one that really delivers the goods, it will make all other tires obsolete overnight. May we all live to see that bright tomorrow! My only problem then: what will I give the club ride leaders--instead of patch kits--at the year-end banquet?
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net