greetings all.

I have been experiencing a series of flats on the road lately, and yesterday had to get a rescue from my wife. I decided to look into tire liners and bought the "Slime" liners at Wal Mart. I installed them after much fumbling and felt pretty satisfied on a job well done; until I stopped in here and searched for tire liners and found this thread. I read every post and realized I might need to check to see if the liners had indeed stayed in place as I reassembled the whole mess.

You guessed it, both had worked their way around as I installed them and were very uneven around the circumference of the tire/tube. I pondered a bit wondering how I could keep them in place so as to have them nicely centered. I thought maybe the two-sided carpet tape I use for installing golf club grips might be sticky enough to adhere to both the liner and the inside of the tire. I tested a small piece on both and it stuck very well.

I then realized it might be a bit on the wide side as it is the same width of the liner. To make it more manageable, I used a utility knife to cut around the roll to get it half as wide and coincidentally about the same width as the contact patch of an inflated tire. Now this tape is somewhat fiberous and very thin, so I figure it will serve two purposes: 1. to hold the liner in place as I reinstall tire and tube and 2. provide just a teeny bit of extra protection against punctures. I was very careful to get the tape centered on the liner first. I then flipped the tire inside out to make sticking it easier to get centered. After it was all back together, I carefully checked to make sure the tire was evenly seated in the rim. In fact, I checked it three times, once with only a few pounds of air, then again with about 30lbs and again at about 50lbs before fully inflating. I finished off the liner with a generous piece of duct tape (yes it's pink because that is all I had and was left over from wrapping the handlebars on one of the grandaughter's bikes because she insisted on having pink ones; and who am I to argue with a 2.5-year old.)

I fully realize that some say these are not needed and others say they will do more harm than good. However with the severity of trash on my routes (and I don't have a lot to choose from), I needed to try something to cut down on the road-side repairs that have a way of spoiling an otherwise pleasant ride. I will keep you posted how this works out. I think one added bonus will be that the liner should (hopefully) stay in place in the event that I pick up a bad enough piece of debris to have to do another repair on the road.

Here is a series of pictures show how it all worked out.

Thorn resistant Inner tubes hold air longer, though more in low pressure fat tires,
than thinner, just because of the greater pressure wanting to escape..

P/V TR tubes in my 700-40 tires on camp-bike tour . Dublin Eire, to Aberdeen Scotland.
no punctures, when kept pumped up hard, let the pressure down, rode under-inflated
and tube creep sheared the valve loose, and tube failed, .. this was back home..

That may well be true but they don't prevent sharp object from reaching them any better than do skinny tires with high pressure tubes as in my Felt F80 road bike; therefore that's a moot point.

Besides, I offered this up merely as a helpful hint for anyone struggling to install tire liners, not as an arguement for or against one product over another; again making a tube that leaks air more slowly from a puncture a moot point here. I'm attempting to minimize punctures not slow down leaks.

Just a little update on the result of this effort to avoid or minimize punctured tubes. I made it 346 miles without a puncture using the tire liners. They definitely added to rolling resistance, but on Tuesday (08/08) I was almost home from a 25-mile trek and had a flat on the front. I stopped to install a spare tube and thoroughly inspected the inside of the tire. It appeared that whatever had caused the flat was now gone. I aired the tire up using CO cartridge and continued on home. Last night I got a chance to tear things down and do a more complete inspection in the comfort of my shop. I still could not find anything in the front tire but did notice the Slime liner was off center for about 6" on either side of the valve. I decided to take a closer look at the area around the leak in the tube. There was a definite line where the liner had dug its way into the tube and the leak was dead in the middle of that line. I inspected the tube further and discovered the line caused by the edges of the liner were all the way around the tube. I suspect that the portion of the edge of the liner that had worked its way around to being under the tube instead of on the side caused that part to form the leak. I then began to fold the tube along the line and noticed that gave it the appearance of being cracked all along that line; even where the liner had stayed in place and the line was well up on the sides of the tube. This has caused me to rethink the use of the liners. I removed both of them last night and will be making a ride early in the morning for a "seat of the pants" comparison of the rolling resistance as well as keeping up with frequency of flats per mile just as in the past. My next purchase at the LBS will likely include pre-slimed presta valve tubes.