That's not gonna patch up...
 

Swapped the winter tires for streets last Saturday. Rode 15 miles Sunday. Rode 9 miles to work yesterday. Rode 1/4 mile home last night and heard a weak pop as the front wheel went squirrley. The innertube had 3 or 4 patches leading me to believe it was two to three years old.

I always carry a spare tube and a pump. ten minutes later I was on my way.

Holy cow! Maybe more than two or three years old.

Is the tire damaged at all? It wasn't seated properly, the bead came off, and the tube blew out. I've had this happen days after I mounted the tire.

I had a tube last almost 4 months one time.

nope!

miss being able to stand a bike upside down

Tubes are too cheap to patch. When mine gets a hole no matter how small, I use a new tube.

It's all a matter of relative worth of money vs time. I'd love to take all your single-puncture tubes off your hands...

Fair enough, but that failure mode looks like it would have happened to a new tube also.

But not to a tubeless! :D

Even if your value time over money there's something to be said for conserving resources. There's a local shop here that offers tubes for $1 a couple of times a year to bring people in to their sales, so I've got a pretty good stock that didn't cost me much but I still keep my punctured tubes and patch them. I generally keep a pile in the garage and patch them on a rainy Saturday when I've got nothing better to do.

If tubes cost me $1, that tilts the time/money balance a lot! If I could get tubes for $1 I might just stop patching as well.

A LBS tube around here costs me like $8-9. Even from WalMart it's like $5-6. I try to throw one or two $3-4 tubes onto mail orders when I am paying S/H for something else anways, but I don't want to stock up too many tubes and they sit around forever and dry out.

So an old patch could result in this? Or only if it was not patched properly?

Sporty (light and lively) vs. durable (heavy and/or stiff) tires

vs. replacing vs. repairing tubes

I hate changing or repairing tubes on my commute, so I ride with bombproof (lightweight stiff tires. Haven't had a flat in years, so I don't feel any remorse in installing a new tube when I suffer one.

OP can correct, but I don't think patches had anything to do with this, he's just saying this is an extreme tube failure that cannot be fixed with a patch

That's not due to whether the tube is old or new nor whether it has been patched or not. That is a blow out and resulted from an improper installation or a faulty bead.

Penny wise. Pound foolish

I can buy a box of 100 patches for about $15. I can buy an 8 oz can of Rema cement for about $15. The can of cement is probably good for about 10 boxes of 100 patches or about 1000 patches. So, for about $165, I can repair 1000 flats. Living in goathead country, that's not that hard a number of flats to attain.

Let's say that it takes about 10 minutes to fix a flat. That's 10,000 minutes or 166 hours. My time is very valuable but let's go by the money that my company gives for my volunteer work...$10 per hour. I'd say that's too much but that works out to $1660 plus the $165 in parts or $1825 total.

At normal retail price for tubes of $9, just replacing the tubes for 1000 flats works out to $9000! That's a lot more than I want to spend on tubes even given the time it takes to patch them. Personally, I haven't ever found anyone selling tubes for $1 each and I'm not sure I would buy them for that price anyway. I'm not terribly picky about tubes but I would question the quality of $1 tubes.

Even at $4 to $5 per tube, the price is still fairly astounding just to replace a tube.

Like I said, penny wise. Pound foolish.

Thanks. I'm hoping my patchwork will last for years :)

I'm with you on your cost/benefit quantification. Even at $4-5/tube I'm a patcher. If I could get $1/tube, I personally wouldn't worry too much about the quality, I'd just ride and throw away. Unless they turned out to be popping on their own every few days, then that wouldn't be worth it. But I find that generally cheaper tubes = heavier/thicker tubes = more durable tubes.

I bought bulk patches for dirt cheap (thanks again to rhm's post) and am eagerly looking forward to the next patching experiment :D. Just one question: do those patches remain good if unused for a long time, say more than a year? (I know the tubes of glue will dry out)

I haven't bought any in a couple months, but the WalMart here usually has Bell 700C for under $4.

Even at that, I patch. Usually toss the tube if I pull it and find three or more patches already on it, or if on the road, patch it to get home and then toss it, even though I have a spare tube in the seat bag.

After about 5 patches, it becomes a point of pride. I've gone as high as 30...then the valve stem failed.

I did have 63 punctures on a tube once when I stopped counting them. I didn't patch that one.

You can fix that easy. Buy a new tube and cut a strip long and wide enough to cover that busted place. Get some good vulcanizing glue. It'll be good for another 2-3 hours before that happens again.

It's pretty easy to carry a patched tube and patch the holed one at home - even to have several and do a patching session once a year maybe.

That is a possibility.

No, If patches fail, they just leak.

[QUOTE=cyccommute;19510831]That's not due to whether the tube is old or new nor whether it has been patched or not. That is a blow out and resulted from an improper installation or a faulty bead.
Always a possibility. But in my opinion the dryness and apparent brittleness of the tube leads me to think it just let go.


:lol:

New tubes also fail sometimes.

This happened on my wife's bike, about a year and a half after she got it. My (heavier) kid was riding it on gravel and it blew out like that (under conditions I might expect a pinch-flat). I have no idea why it blew out like that. There was no evidence of any tire damage (and I have since put that tire on my bike, just in case).