You asked how you would get home. We offered the solution.

You find a scrap of plastic bag & wrap it around the hole a bunch of times as a temporary patch. The air pressure will help seal it. I did it once and it held air for a week. That's the upside to litter.

I've been having a run of bad luck patching my tubes. I've had three in a row fail.

Incorrect. I was making a point. I already said I carry those patch kits as well as spare tubes.

Okay, what's your point? Maybe it's being lost in an attempt to be clever.

As a kid, I did a lot of patching with the old school heat vulcanizing patches - never had one of those fail. I think I bought a new tube maybe once or twice as a kid and I lived on my bike every day. I haven't been at it as long as an adult with the modern patches, but I still have yet to have one fail. I don't use the self adhesive kind though.

Are these the preglued ones or the ones with the separate glue pack?

How did you manage to get the patch inside your tube?

I will only throw out a tube if I get a puncture near the valve stem or a gash more than 5 or 6 mm long. I never check my patches. I think inflating a tube by itself makes it more likely to fail. I've only had a few patches fail while inflating it inside the tire. I have never had a patch fail down the road. If you live in goat head country, it is a good idea to carry two tubes. I once veered off a shoulder and got about 25 punctures in each tube.

I carry one spare tube and the Park Tool patch kit. If it's easy to identify where the hole is, I'll use the patch kit, and like someone else said, sometimes you don't even need to remove the wheel. If it's not obvious where the patch should go it's quicker for me to change the tube and patch the hole when I get home. I've only been riding for about a year but I haven't had one of these patches fail. Yet.

I think it does make more sense to install a patched tube with pressure right away so that it's held tight against the inside of the tire, instead of letting it sit around loose in the garage for six months.

Unzipped it.

I started patching....40 yrs ago. Then quite after it seemed many of the patches were not holding up with high pressure. So for the past 38 or so years i have always carried 2 tubes and tossed any flats. Due to the advice and comments from this forum I have changed my ways and now patch.
I still carry 2 tubes, some habits are hard to break . Besides, you never know when someone else may benifit from an extra tube.

I've had problems patching with the separate glue tube. Too much glue, not enough glue, applying the patch too soon, waiting too long, it's all a very annoying headache to save two bucks.

So what do you think is the problem? Technique, product used?

I still think that while tubes aren't that expensive, if you've got 5 or so punctured tubes you can repair in 15 minutes, that's a pretty good return on your money. Especially if you run the Bontrager tubes (they feel noticeably thicker than the Nashbar ones which I've had several pop while inflating with a hand pump) which run about $7 each.

I'm not a penny pincher, but $35 for 5 tubes repaired in 15 minutes is pretty decent, especially since it's actually pretty satisfying and very easy to patch a tube. Even at $3/tube, that's pretty good.

Plus, I hate throwing out perfectly good tubes that just have a near-microscopic hole in them, particularly near-new ones. The waste definitely bugs me even more than the cost of the tube, and I'm very happy if I can put in a trivial amount of work to keep on using an otherwise perfectly good product without adding to a landfill.

At least with the Forte (Performance Bike) el-cheapo kit I bought for 2.50, the glue part was ridiculously easy. Seriously. It's just rubber cement - you just put a small dab on/near the hole, and smooth it out with your finger. It dries in under a minute, faster if you blow on it. Put on extra - it won't hurt anything. I though for sure I'd screw it up, but it seemed nearly idiot-proof to me, so long as you let it dry out BEFORE putting on the patch (as the instructions clearly say.)

I thought it would be messy, but for sure, the water-soluble water cement was again a trivial nuisance that I barely even needed to clean my hands afterwards on. (For sure, chain grease of any sort is 100x more of a pain.)

15 flats? geez. why so many?

Over a 2.5-3 year period, riding probably 100-150mi/week pretty consistently during that time. So probably not so off average.

If the flats were evenly distributed over that period, it wouldn't be as much of an annoyance to me, but I think most of my flats happened in clusters of 2 and 3 in a matter of weeks. Add the occasional re-flat while still on the same ride, and sometimes I'd be hitting 4-6 tubes in a 2 month period in a bad stretch.

Might have to do with thorn season, or lack of road cleaning during certain times, but it was hella annoying when it happened, and it still does occur from time to time, even with Gatorskins on my bike.

90% of all statistics is made up on the spot.

And yes, patching is the way forward and it holds just fine.

Yeah, the instant patches (or pre-glued) are OK for a quick fix. But, I tried to keep it on (instead of actually gluing a patch on) and it ALWAYS failed. Sometimes it would last a week - sometimes months, but ALWAYS eventually failed. I've only had about 10% of the glued patches fail and it was probably due to crappy conditions when I was gluing it (rain, cold).

I agree with others here. #1 is spare tube. If that fails, then I will repair the flat on the road. Remember to always check for WHY the tire was punctured. You don't want to put a new tube in only to get a flat a few minutes later because a piece of glass was sticking through the tread.

Thats it for me. I guess my grandfather's post-depression, don't ever waste anything attitude stuck a little with me. Its definitely not about the money. I just cant stand throwing away something I know I can fix in a few minutes.

Ah, I was just about to ask why so many flats, but I know some people live in areas where thorns fall on roads. I believe my last road flat was in 2002 since we don't have thorns, generally speaking people don't throw glass on the roads, and the roads are so undulating that rainwater washes anything off to the side.

The failure rate with these has been high for me. I stopped using them.

BTW, on the road, patching can be easier than replacing the tube if you can find the leak without removing the wheel. I can do this about 30% of the time. Then just unhook the tire near the puncture, pull out a small section of tube and patch.

I nominate this thread for the Johnny Lunchpail Trophy.

Dang either you're so old or I'm so young that I have no idea what you're talking about. LOL