"The 33"-Road Bike Racing - Bad flat karma

How can I appease the flat gods? I raced at Manda (Texas) yesterday. About seven miles from the finish I picked up a nail. Somehow it went straight into the tire, entered the tube, came out the other side of the tube, and then punctured through the rim on my carbon Blackwell. I've flatted in every race this season except one. What can be done to get rid of the bad flat mojo?

http://i571.photobucket.com/albums/ss160/tsutexan93/Nailinwheel.jpg

time to sacrifice that rim to the cycling gods.

dear god, is the rim OK? worst luck ever. I want to make a remark about how i haven't flatted in a while, but i know it'll come back and bite me on the ride home tonight.

Reminds me of the time I had a screw go straight through my CXP 33's. It looked like I had two presta valves.

Not much you can besides race with heavy kevlar belted training tires. But that nail would've got you either way.

gotta wonder where the race organizers were on this one.

seems like a foreign object of that size should have been swept.

time to sacrifice that rim to the cycling gods.

Good question about the rim. I rode it to the finish yesterday after fixing the flat. The nail went completely into the rim. Should I scrap it or have it checked out? Blackwell is out of business. There are not any radiating cracks around the hole. It's a full carbon clincher.

I don't know enough about carbon to answer that definitively.

But, purely subjectively, if it were me I wouldn't ride it.

holy sh*t.

Holy cr*p, that is intense. It seems like the course should have been swept for stuff like that, send the promoter an email telling him to fix that garbage for the next race.

As far as the rim goes, scrap it. Once carbon is punctured like that, the entire structural integrity is compromised. You can still ride for a while, but it's only a matter of time before fatigue sets in and the wheel critically fails on you. Talk to you LBS and try to get a deal and a good race wheel.

Sucks about the whole karma thing...

I wouldn't scrap it just yet. Call up Kirklee bikes, they do lots of custom carbon stuff, and are located in Austin. Brad may be able to fix it good as new.

http://kirkleebicycles.com/contact.html

That rim is toast.

That particular Blackwell rim is made by Gigantex so any wheel maker who works with those rims might possibly sell you a replacement. Try Nuevation they work with those rims as well, John Neugent who owns the company seems like a good dude.

If that doesn't work PlanetX, Beyond and Karbona are others who use the same rim.

Good luck.

I wouldn't scrap it just yet. Call up Kirklee bikes, they do lots of custom carbon stuff, and are located in Austin. Brad may be able to fix it good as new.

http://kirkleebicycles.com/contact.html

Thanks for the idea. I know another guy who knows Brad. I sent him the pics and I think we're set. Brad thinks it's fixable for reasonable price so I'm gonna send it to Austin for a little love from KirkLee.