Originally Posted by
irclean
Hard to do this on the road, especially when dark/cold/wet, but an easy trick for detecting insidious bits of glass remaining inside the tire is to drag a cotton ball through the entire inside circumference. The cotton should snag on any offending bits left behind.
That's a good trick, but didn't catch some of mine. Some little shards were so small and just wedged into tiny cracks in the tread. I think they were like sleeper cells or guerilla tactics... they just sat around and waited until they got pressed in a little deeper by something else on the road. Then they popped my tube and withdrew to the hidden spot in the tire. I could only find them by making sure I lined up my tires brand name mark w/ the valve stem, so I could match up hole in tube to approximate location on the tire.
Since the old tires were getting pretty worn, I got new tires a few weeks ago and have been very happlly riding flat-free since then.