Originally Posted by indyfabz

+1. I woke up to a flat rear tire after the first day of my 2014 cross-PA tour. Spent a good amount of time trying to find the cause. Couldn’t find anything in the tire. Nor could I find the hole in the tube. Finally pumped the tube with a lot of air and ran it through a puddle left over from the heavy rain the day before.

Found the tiniest of holes. It was so small, an air bubble would only appear every two seconds or so. Locating the hole helped me finally locate the tiny piece of wire in the tire. I had probably picked it up on a busy, wet road after grocery shopping just before camp. Had I simply put in a fresh tube without doing an extensive search for the cause of the flat, I almost certainly would have flatted again once I got back on the road, this time with the bike fully loaded.