Originally Posted by
robalong
Wonderful insights! Thanks a lot for them. I'm with you on not patching tubes. A hit and miss affair, in my experience. No bubbles in the water after patching ... two days later, flat again. Far too often.
First…yet again…use the proper patch. In my experience the only one that actually uses chemistry to make new rubber bonds is Rema. Everything else is a poor imitation that uses rubber cement. Rema uses a chemical in the patch and chemicals in the vulcanizing fluid that actually react and does more than just make a poor physical bond that rubber cement does. Second,
do not fill the tube to check the patch…at least for a while. Filling the tube immediately after patching…even with the Rema…will pull the patch away from the tube and make for gaps. It won’t make much difference with rubber cement patching but with Rema, a couple of days of curing will ensure that the patch doesn’t pull up.
Patching is not only economical, it is environmentally friendly. Rubber isn’t something that can usually be recycled so just throwing it away after one use is just adding to landfills. Granted, it’s not much but it’s still wasteful. On the economical side, I have tubes with 25+ patches on them…I live in goathead country. At $3 each but usually closer to $8 each, that’s from $75 to $200 worth of single tube use. I can buy patches and fluid in bulk for about $0.25 patch job or about the same cost as a single tube.