So my Volpe finally arrived after a little over a month of waiting. I'm thrilled with the bike, though I have only gotten to do a short (6 miles or so) ride on it due to the tropical storm yesterday and today and my needing to study for organic chem.

I picked up some Panaracer UrbanMax slicks at Performance a while back when I was visiting in Atlanta (we don't have one here) and went to put them on last night in place of the knobbies that came on the bike. So I put the first one on, pumped it up to 95psi using my road morph (I've verified the accuracy of the gauge) and set it aside while I started on the second one. Less than a minute later, I hear a funny noise and look over to see the tire slipping off the rim a second before the loud bang of the tube exploding.

OK...maybe I pinched the tube, but I felt maybe the bead was bad on that tire, so I decided to try again with the other tire this time (same rim). Same procedure, I double check I haven't pinched the tube this time, and pump it up to 80psi (just in case), this time I did not even get the wheel set to the side before it blew.

Down two tubes, I decided to give up and put the original tire back on the wheel. I got it on fine, and pumped it up to the recommended psi. So far no bang.

I am pretty confident that I did not pinch the tube on the second attempt and that the gauge on my pump is accurate enough that it should not be causing this problem. Does this sound like the bead is bad on the tires or is there another possible cause I'm missing?

It took a good 15 minutes for my nerves to recover after the second one blew and my brother thought it was a gun going off.