Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
The mysterious flat of mysterious (flat) mystery
I mentioned on Friday that the rear tire on my bike was strangely flat. I had no idea what would have caused it, but figured that it was something I'd run over.
I went out to the garage tonight to see if I could figure out the problem.
Off came the wheel, and out came the innertube. Looks ok. A bit of pumping usually shows the leak, no problem. Oh, hmm. No leak. Pump more. Nope. The tube appeared to be whole and healthy, yet the tire was flat. Maybe it was a fluke?
So I put the tube and tire back on, and pumped up the tire. It seemed to hold air just fine. Weird. Maybe it was a slow leak. I left the tire to sit for a few hours, perhaps it would feel more like talking after a bit of the old solitary isolation.
Several hours later, I went to look at it again. Nearly flat. Hmm. There are two likely explanations for this: one, the tube spontaneously failed. It's possible, and I wouldn't put it past these cheap Specialized tubes which keep ending up in the rear tire. Two, I picked up something pokey in the tire, at least temporarily, which put a miniscule hole in the rear tube.
I pulled out the tube, and discarded it, figuring that pretty much takes care of option one (he said, pulling out another cheap Specialized tube... sigh). I'd checked the inside of the tire after I had it apart the first time, but I didn't find anything then.
So, off came the tire entirely (so to speak). I carefully ran my fingers along the inside of the tire, feeling for anything pokey or out of the ordinary. I got 90% of the way around the tire when I felt it -- something sharp poking through the tire. I looked at the spot, and could just barely see that the inner surface looked disrupted. Whatever it was, it was small.
I flipped over the tire and looked at the tread. There was a spec of dust, and something white in about the right spot. The dust brushed away, but the white thing didn't. Ah-hah! On closer inspection, "white" turned out to be "shiny." That's not right.
With a bit of fiddling, I pulled the foreign object out of my tire: a 3mm length of about 22 gauge wire. It'd gone in at an angle, and was just barely poking into the innertube, and was just barely visible on the outside. Bleh!
Well, I'm glad that one went flat after I got home. It would have been a really annoying repair to make on the road, just because finding that little thing would have been difficult. So, hooray for small favors! And (solvable) mysteries!
Posted at 00:19 permanent link category: /bicycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater