But you can say guns plural.

I was having "nipple pimple" problems for a while. Never caused an on the road flat, but I'd go out in the morning to find a flat tire.

It seems the rims with a 42mm tire weren't happy.

High pressure mylar rim tape with Velox over the top solved the problem. Either one by itself didn't work out.

Two situations, both caused by inattention, one mountain biking, one on the road. And then a multi-puncture record.

While mountain biking on a local suburban loop, I was on a section of boring dirt "sidewalk" and zoning out, when I suddenly realized someone had piled up a bunch of cactus pads across the trail. Too late to do anything, even bunny hop, I plowed right through it. Sure enough, both tires/tubes went instantly flat. I found each tire filled with spines. The worst was that these were brand new tires, now completely destroyed - even with all the spines pulled out, there remain "mini-spines" - backward facing stiff hairs that force the cactus spines deeper into your flesh, which in a tire can be a cause of repeated flats.

I called my wife to come pick me up.

Near the end of a long road ride, I was only a mile or so from home and weary. Zoning out again, I let my front wheel wander into a long crack in the asphalt. The crack was just tire width, and jagged. Again, both tires/tubes taken out. Again I called my long-suffering wife!

The worst ride for punctures was a ride with my friend, Jim, who early in the ride suffered a double snake bite on his front tube - two double punctures on each side of the tube from slamming into a small pothole. Total of four holes two patch. It took him two re-inflations to discover all of them!

Later in the ride, we had temporarily ended up on the tail of a large club ride. Somewhere near the front, someone managed to flip the steel cover off of an 8 inch pipe coming up to the surface of the road. The cover got knocked around as riders swerved wildly to avoid it. Jim never got to the hockey scrim with the cover, as he slammed into the open pipe end, and once again got double snake bites on his front tube!

That made for a total of eight holes in his tube on a single ride! Anybody got more than that???

I've had so many flats from Michelin wires, I can't see that they're unusual or wierd.

I had a flat once that I fixed, only to have it recur a couple more times a week or so apart. There wasn't anything sticking through the tire that caused it, though. The first flat was a clean cut, maybe 1/4" wide. As I continued riding with new tubes, that 1/4" cut started "chewing" on the tube, until it chewed its way through and started a leak.

The one that made me maddest was a Vittoria Randonneur tire. Apparently the sidewalls of the tire had wires to stiffen them. One wire broke, and started poking holes in my tubes. Every time I checked the inside of the tire, it had relaxed back into the rubber of the sidewall. I killed 4 tubes in one day before I found that sucker. (And I haven't bought another Vittoria tire since then!)

Roadkill.


Narrow shoulder State highway and lots of traffic on my morning commute, so I was watching for traffic coming up behind me more than paying attention to what was on the road in front of me. Whatever that dead/flattened critter was, the bone fragments were sharp, slicing through the sidewall of my nearly-new Kevlar-belted touring tires...

.

I was riding a paved trail in the local state park. A squirrel ran onto the path and stopped right in front of me. I swerved to keep from hitting him, went off the pavement and hit a tree root hard enough to pop my tube. The squirrel survived and I didn't fall. The tube was dead.

Your photo reminds me of what was removed from a woman's stomach who suffered from pica (basically, eating things that are not food).

Or a great white in Jaws.

The oddest has to be when I suddenly got a flat, and a 'hop' in my wheel. I ran over a ball point pen and the ink tube inside went through my tire and tube. And stuck there, which resulted in the hop.

Most of my flats are either goatshead stickers or when the valve head irreparably fails (after a long life with no flats).

The most dramatic was when the nice air-conditioned LBS topped off both tires after replacing one flat. About 2 miles down the hot asphalt road, BOOM both tires blew off the rim. No sag was available but it was just a couple of hot miles walking home.

The most unusual time was when I bike-commuted 8 miles to work, then before riding home noticed that my well-worn rear tire was showing threads and bulging over the edge of the rim. The innertube was visible for over 1" through the tear. So I headed out for my commute towards home, riding really slow and absolutely babying it on corners. As an Athena with a 30# bike with a rack and loaded pannier, there was quite a load on the wheels. After making it through the entire 8 mile distance WITHOUT flatting, I took the bike to the LBS to buy a new tire. We were all amazed that you could stick two fingers all the way through the tire split with the innertube undamaged. And most likely the tire had been split on my way to work, so I could have traveled most of the 16 mile round trip with the tire split.

Riding my bicycle sideways caused a flat and my rear wheel to taco. I was riding it sideways (I was not sideways on the bike, the bike was going sideways) because another cyclist stiff-armed me as I passed him. We both went down when my rim warped.

Rock, brick or other blunt object. Riding ninja in Tucson yrs ago. The road surface was invisible. Just a smooth black river. The sides of the road were barely visible shadows. Never saw the rock, brick or whatever. Next morning my rear tire was flat.

Some of these are a hoot.

My odd flat causer isn't really odd at all around here. Broken mussel shells. Those damn seagulls drop them on the bike path to crack them open.

The Phantom Flatter strikes again.

Got back from a ride and rolled my bike into the garage. I was in the process of taking off my helmet, gloves, etc. when I noticed that the tire was noticeably flatter than normal. When I checked, I found a small staple loosely protruding from the tire. Not a big industrial staple but just a little tiny staple from an office-type stapler. I had ridden 35 trouble-free miles only to get a flat tire in my garage after I got off my bike.

Did you try filing off any of the spoke that protrudes above the top of the nipple? That can help too.

The first thing I did was completely deburr and smooth the holes before replacing the factory rubber rim strip with Velox. Didn't help. Only worked for a few hundred miles. My original theory was that it was the factory rim strip that had clearly extruded into the nipple holes.

It seems it was a confluence of the 42mm tire diameter and the rim size. I suspect that that's because the tire/rim combination forces the tube into a pear shape.

A layer of high pressure mylar rim tape and then the Velox over the top of that cured the problem. About a 1,000 miles now with no additional problems. Velox by itself didn't work and the high pressure tape by itself extruded too. The combination has worked fine and no problems with interference on getting the bead to seat .

I was riding the shoulder of a divided highway and had an instant blowout. My front tire was sliced all the way across the tread. I made a boot of a couple dollar bills, put in a new tube and rode the six miles home.
Curiosity got the best of me and I drove out to the scene of the flat. Walking the shoulder I found ten box cutter blades intact and the pieces of several more. Had I not picked them they could have caused many more instant flats.

Yikes. I dont want to imagine wiping out and being sliced or stabbed by one of those.

Staples are wierd. My daughter rode between 5-10 miles with a timber staple whapping her stay before we found it. No flat. Next day I hit a smaller timber staple and flatted immediately.

Once went out for a longish ride starting out in cool weather on a day forecast to get fairly hot. I wore some kind of long sleeve jersey intending to remove it when things warmed up. They warmed up and I tied it around my waist. Somehow some piece of the jersey got caught up in my rear brake calipers on a fairly high speed downhill. It got sucked up between the calipers and the tire and literally shredded both the tire and tube. The brakes had to be removed so that the tire/tube could be replaced.

dave

Paper clip.

Here is one that didn't go flat--go figure. I picked up some road debris between my rear wheel and the fender. It locked up my rear wheel, but did not seem to really hurt anything. I rode the 4 miles home, including a 28 mph downhill. I was looking at my rear fender, which folded pretty spectacularly, when I noticed this:
http://i783.photobucket.com/albums/y...8a4b24eb92.jpg

My ex wife she slit the tires on my bike.

Poon

I got a puncture from something on my first RAGBRAI. Patched or replaced the tube after carefully checking the hole in the tire for any sharp debris without finding any. It was fine for several weeks but then I got another flat. On inspection it was right over that old hole so I checked again without finding any debris. Near as I could tell and the same conclusion someone above reached, the rough rubber edges of the hole gradually chewed through the inner tube. This time I patched the tube and put a patch on the inside of the tire and no trouble since.

I also kinda got a flat on rollers last winter. Not exactly but one night while filling the tires I managed to bend the stem holding the Presta valve sealer one bend past the point of metal fatigue when I put the filler hose on and of course as I pumped air in the tire the internal part of the valve got blown into the tube and when I took the filler off there was nothing left to seal the valve, hisssssssss

They werent new, I hope.