I love Park's Tire Boots!!
#1
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I love Park's Tire Boots!!
I rode from Pittsburgh to DC last week and had 3 flats in the last 5 miles. The first 330 mile on the GAP & C&O was no problem but as soon as I got into DC!! I probably pushed the lie expectancy of the tires but I used them anyway. The last 2 flats I found a hole in the center of the tire and I just cut a Parks Tire Boot into 2 pcs. and I was good to go after fixing the tubes. So I will never leave home without them!!
#2
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A dollar bill or a scrap of Tyvek work just as well. Pittsburgh to DC on a rail trail sounds like a great ride. How was the traffic?
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Traffic?? No traffic until I got to Georgetown. It a great ride.
#5
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I want to do that ride sometime. I have ridden pieces of all the trails, but never the whole thing at once. The Paw Paw tunnel is very cool!
-SP
-SP
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Back to the OP, Park boots have saved my bacon and gotten me home on two separate occasions. I keep a couple in the seat bag. In each case, the tire was toast, but I made it back OK.
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I ran into problems with this very product when applying it and then trying to ride at full pressure. the boot itself - however thin it may seem - has an edge and doesn't play nice with the rubber tire after a number of revolutions. That small edge actually gradually cut into my tire and gave me a flat ! So this is a very qualified criticism - at high pressure, over some distance. So I wouldn't try to use a park boot like this again.
Anyway, my preferred "boot" now is actually an old-style tube patch. They're round or square-ish and get very thin on the edge, so thin that they don't cut in. They're not pre-glued so you apply one with a bit of glue from a tube. Instead of glueing it onto a hole on my tube, I just invert it and glue it onto a hole on my tire from the inside. With this as a boot, I was able to get back to normal air pressure and do a few hundred km before I got tired of the experiment and went ahead and replaced the tire. Probably would have gone hundreds more if I tried.
As another backup, I also carry that paper stuff, probably called Tyvek that somebody mentioned.