spiker

Last time someone patched a flat for me was near 40 years ago & was actually agaist my will. I was in college & riding with a friend & he got a blow out. We had irons & patches but no glue or pump. There was a gas staion about 50 feet away & attempted to buy/borrow glue & use the air pump. Remember air was free back then. The guy in the gas staion says he'll fix it. We want to keep riding so we agree. When he's done he charges us $2.00. This is 1971 so $2.00 is more than minimum wage at the time. Bummer for him 'cause all we had between us was less than 50 cents. Took it & told us not to come back. So we didn't...

colleen c

Hey! That's my MO! Works for me! Lower my head with a depress facial expression when I see an approaching cyclist. Helps keep the greese off my finger nail

Ok, honestly I rather fix my own flat than to wait for someone at 4:30 am out on the street. First thing I did was to learn how to get those 700x25 $&@! Armadillo and Gatorskin off the rims. Once master those, everything else was a "cinche".

dynodonn 

$2 then would be a little over $10 today. You got a good deal for 50 cents($2.60 today), and unlike the time I paid a lawn mower repair shop $5 ($32 today) to sharpen a mower blade, back in the late 60's, that took all of 30 to 45 seconds to do. Needless to say, I bought my own bench grinder afterwards.

PaulRivers

There's a lot of stuff I'll pay a bike shop to do. Repacking bearings, replacing cables, truing a wheel (it's an art - an art I'm not willing to constantly practice at enough to get good at), replacing brake pads (tried once, couldn't seem to get the angle right, maybe I'll try it myself again some day), etc.

I'm kinda lazy, I don't really like working on my bike. I usually even pay them to clean the chain (all that hassle to get rid of the used oil properly...).

But I change my own flats because the only way it would be easier and faster for a shop to do it is if my tire got a flat as I was putting my bike in the bike rack at the bike shop - on a day they weren't booked. I can change a flat in the amount of time it would take me to put my bike in the car and drive the bike to the bike store. And that's not counting the time it takes to unload it, talk to the mechanic, wait for him to get to it, wait for him to do it (and that's if they're not already booked or something), pay, load it back into my car, and drive home - it's MORE time consuming and difficult to get the shop to do it than it is to do myself.

It's just faster and easier to do it myself, especially when you consider that I really need to have the supplies (spare tube, pump, patch kit, etc) on my bike for fixing a flat if I got one in the middle of nowhere, and it's a no brainer.

Heck, the next time I get new tires I'm tempted to pay them to put them on (what a pain in the ... last time, new tires are much harder to get on and off than tires you've used a bit). But fixing my own flats just seems like the easier, lazier option to me.

mijome07

AAA fixes my flats.

maxine

Yeah, in the several years since I started buying decent tires (and replacing them before I can actually see daylight through them! ) I've had very few flats. But for the few that have happened, yes, I fix them myself.

I've helped others, too. One episode that always makes me smile when I think of it: a few years back I was doing an MS150 ride. A long way ahead of me on a straight stretch, I could see two guys by the side of the road, one bike down. As I got closer I could see they were wearing all the "serious" roadie gear, team kit from their sponsoring company, etc. I was thinking, "Oh, man, they look so baffled, it must be something seriously wrong, like the derailleur has exploded into a million pieces or something, but I'll still do the 'accepted cyclist thing' and ask if I they need any help."

Which I did -- and their problem was a flat tire, on the rear wheel. They had been talked into riding with the company team not too long before the event, the guy with the flat had just gotten the bike the day before, neither of them had a clue as to what to do about the flat. They asked me to do a "how-to commentary" as I swapped the tube for them.

Classic case of judging the book by its (fancy-pants roadie gear) cover!

kire

I carry a tube, patch kit, levers and pump, but I rarely flat. I change them for my housemate (rare that she goes out without me, and I usually go to her triathlon events). I have taught her, a couple of times, but I do it faster, so I usually just jump in and do it to keep us moving (and her hands clean...)

I was riding along a MUP about a month ago and ran across a teenager walking an old 3 speed with a flat.

Me: "Need help?"
Kid: "No, I just have a flat"
Me: "...Yeah, but do you want a hand?..."
Kid: "What would do you?"
Me: "Replace the tube... I have one right here" <-points to pannier
Kid: "Oh. No, that's ok. I need to get to school."

It was a very strange interaction, it left me trying to decide how he thought getting to school walking a flat tire would be any faster...

woodway

Yup. Swap out the tube, patch the old one at home and store it back on the bike. I actually carry two tubes because I double flatted on some glass once. Once a tube gets three patches I toss it on the 4th flat on the theory that it's "used up". Nothing scientific behind that, just a theory.

wunderkind

What do you mean? One of these follows me when I go on rides.



Don't you have one?

akohekohe

Ok, I'm on this supported cross-country tour and I come across these two other people on the ride, one of whom has a flat. So the three of us try to fix it ... can't do it, every-time we pump it up it goes flat again. Now it turns out one of these guys had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, one in EE, and mine is in statistics. So three Ph.D.s and we can't fix a flat and he had to wait for the SAG. How embarrassing. In our defense, it turns out the wheel had a defective rim that was causing the problem, but still.

hairnet

I'm that car on most group rides, if only I could carry extra bikes and food with me. I always have a chain tool, tire levers, patch kit, tubes, pump, 4, 5, and 6 hex keys, spoke wrench, chainring tool, 15mm wrench and lockring tool (for the fixies)

ben4345

seriously?! just takes 2 minutes to fix a flat.

akohekohe

At home I always put the repaired tube back in the wheel, pump it up and then check it after a few hours. This is to make sure the patch took, every once in a while the patch will fail under pressure even if it looked like the patch was good. This saves me from replacing the tube on the road and then have the patch fail.

CACycling

Swap out the tube then stash it to be repaired at home. Carry a patch kit in case I get multiple flats.

lawrencehare

Ditto...

PaulRivers

I don't do this - if I replace the tube I throw the old one out. When I was a kid, my dad always used to do this. Didn't work so well. When one of us would get a flat, half the time he would pull out the tube and the patch on the old tube would be broken somehow. Not sure why - maybe he wasn't patching the tube right. Or maybe the patch, when stored bend over inside a seat bag, doesn't hold up (or the glue doesn't hold up). I've had better luck with patches on a tube that's actually being used in the tire - being smashed up against the tire seems to do a better job at not breaking the patch somehow.

Since the advent of flat resistant tires, I get a flat maybe once a year at most, not worth the worry about my backup tube for me. (Though to be fair - I've had new tubes fail as well due to manufacturing defects, so go figure.)

mijome07

I need to get one of those.

BassNotBass

I usually get the same response when offering to help fix a flat, undo a derailleur/chain nest or fix anything else that could keep a cyclist from getting home or to work. So I kindly let them know that if they don't want me to fix it right then and there, they can come down to the shop on Saturday when I'm working and I'd be more than happy to fix the problem at the shop rate of $35/hour.

khanom

I can't even conceive of paying someone to fix a flat. Does not compute.

mijome07

I know a bike mechanic that comes to my house for repairs. Cheaper than a bike shop and does some stuff for free.

CCrew

I don't change mine. Isn't that why cyclists shave their legs? Get a flat, ya show a little leg, someone stops and fixes it.













Oh, I'm a 53yo male. You best believe I carry all the stuff to change it, no one's stopping for me

JPprivate

On a sidenote, if you're 53 years old, you are NOT older than dirt!!!!


Just sayin'....

Greg_R

I think this case can be chalked up to "never talk to strangers"; he probably didn't feel safe with the situation. Similarly, most of the women riders I know prefer to call someone they know (if they can't fix their bike) rather than rely on the random stranger who comes along.

Greg_R

Not just content with replacing bike tires, I repaired my child's stroller tire the other night (~8" tube, ran over a thorn).

wolfchild

I fix my own flats but it's not very often that I get them. I believe that every cyclist should learn how to fix their own flats. It's one of the easiest skills to learn, there is no excuse for not being able to do it yourself.