Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
Some friends of mine did Southern Tier. They did an indoor trip, no camping. Started in California, rode to Florida, rented a minivan and each day a different member of the group drove the van with their luggage and provided water stops while the others rode.
In the desert southwest, one of them had seven flats a day on average with his skinny tire road bike. That sounded horrendous to me, until I started reading some of the experience of others in this thread. Suddenly seven flats per day does not sound so bad. That said, I average one flat per year.
Having lived where the pestilence of goat heads has existed long before I got here...and I remember dinosaurs wandering the landscape
...I have a bit of a sixth sense about goat heads. I know where they grow and where I’m likely to run into them. But like all psychic abilities, mine are more imagined than real and every tube I own has at least one patch from goat heads. More often they have 10 to 20. People from outside the area...i.e. most of the rest of the nation...tend not to know where to find them but the goatheads will find you. I’m not surprised by the number of flats that your group of people from out of the area got. Lots of people just ride off the road when they stop and right into a patch of them. People from around here tend to stop on the pavement and look before they go off into the dirt.
But one of that group had a total of four flats for the whole trip, he brought his Cannondale touring bike, had 35 or 37mm tires on it, I do not know what brand or model of tires, but they had better flat protection than the skinny road bike tires that some of the others used.
Lots of tires...even tubeless ones...have protection belts under the tread. They are effective...not perfect, but effective. Like I said above, I use plastic liners which are the same thing but reusable. Mine are at least 20 years old. I may have some that are 40 years old.
Just reading the first post in that thread may have cleared up a mystery that has bothered me for years. At my local co-op, we have buckets of relatively high end mountain bike tires with little to no wear on the tread. I always assumed that the people donating the tires went to another brand and dumped the old tires on us. yannisg says
4. After you clean the tires and rims they are difficult to seal again even with a compressor. So I sometimes end up replacing the tire even though it's not worn.
That might explain why we have so damned many tubeless tires. Yet another reason why I’m just not interested.