Originally Posted by
work4bike
If you're getting to the point in your UL mindset of thinking about throwing out your patch repair kit, then I would give the UL thinking a rest for a while. I've been in many places where there were no bike shops around for umpteen miles, so unless you're always touring near cities, than don't even consider ditching the tube repair kit.
+1 I carry spare tubes because they are convenient. Slip out the punctured one and slip in a unpunctured tube, then fix the puncture later. But an unpunctured tube is only good for
one flat. If you are going to only carry a tube, then you should carry enough tubes to cover all possible flats you might encounter. Having had flats from two separate causes within 100 yards of one another, I wouldn't depend on tubes alone.
In fact, I'd depend on the patch kit before I depended on tubes. A larger Rema Tiptop patch kit with a 2oz tube of glue will repair about 10 punctures before the glue is gone. I buy patches by the 100 box...I live where goatheads are a curse...and always add more patches to every Rema kit I carry. I could easily carry 3 patch kits with enough patches to fix 30 flats in the weight and volume of a single tube. It takes more time to fix a flat on the road with a patch but at least I can do it more than once.
I do carry around 10 patches with me at all times...goatheads remember..and I have been on a mountain bike ride where 4 people used all of my tubes (2) all of their tubes (4) and the 10 patches in my kit, the 10 in my wife's kit and all of the patches in 2 more kits (they didn't have 10 in them) and we still didn't have enough. Between the 4 of us, we had 27 flats. My wife had 2 (both in the tire that
didn't have the liner), the guy with the tubeless tires had 5 (one of the reasons I'm not a fan of tubeless) and the last poor person got 20 of them. She ended up pumping up the tire, riding as fast as she could for as far as she could and then pumping up the tire again. We did about 5 miles of this before the end of the ride.
Oh, and I had no flats whatsoever. I'm convinced that Mr. Tuffys work and crowed loudly about it! But Karma is a harsh mistress. The next time I did the same ride, I carried a bike up the last steep pitch with the tires falling off the rim and I stopped counting flats at 60. I carry a few more patches and don't tempt Karma
Originally Posted by
work4bike
BTW, why did you throw out the patched tube? I've had tubes with tons of patches, the patches are actually stronger than the tube.
I suppose if I were using the stick on (temporary) patches, I'd throw away the tube as well but with a good patch kit ***cough***Rema***cough*** there's no need. I usually stop patching when I feel the number of patches per tube is ridiculous...around 30.