Originally Posted by
Milton Keynes
I'm just absolutely amazed that you got a bike tube up to 35 PSI before it exploded.
It was nowhere near 35 psi. Try pumping up a tube outside a tire (wear hearing protection) using a pump with a gauge; you might not even see the needle on the gauge move before the tube explodes.
I once worked in a bike shop that had been open 45 years (since the 1930s); the shop had a very old handmade wire form about the size and shape of a motorcycle tire, the idea being that to find a slow leak in a tube from a balloon-tire bike, you'd insert the tube, inflate it enough to expand to fill the form, and plunge it into a sink filled with water to find the leak.