Lessons Learned



Motobecane11

New Member
Nov 24, 2011
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So today I had my first flat. Picked up a nail on my way home from work, no big deal I thought. Lesson #1: If you use a nail to poke a hole in the tiree side of your tube, it is almost inevitable that the nail will poke about 14 more holes in the rim side of the tube. Lesson #2: If you poke a hole in your tube by any method, the best course of action on the side of the road is to go straight to a new tube and tend to patching the old one when you get home. This was a good learning experience for me lol. I wasted a bunch of time trying to patch and pump the old tube not nowing about the 15 holes on the rim side of the tube. On a brighter note, I've recently upgraded the ride. The old rear wheel was a little out of round, had a slight flat and slight high spot. So I went with a new wheel, and while it was in the shop, I figured I might as well go all the way. I converted from a Suntour 32-14 five speed freewheel to a Shimano 28-14 six speed freewheel, which mandated a new chain and a new Shimano Tourney rear DR. Overall, I couldn't be more satisfied. The old Suntour had some really big shifts, four and five teeth per shift, and that made it hard to stay in a good cadence. The narrower range and shifts on the Shimano siix are really nice. I averaged about 2 mph faster on my am commute, and was really trucking it this afternoon until the flat happened. I farted around with that long enough to completely cool down and just couldn't spin as good as I had been for the last 2 miles home. Even with that, I still averaged 15.7 mph, so the new setup has done wonders for keeping my pace up.
 
Why would there be 14 holes the way lesson 1 is outlined? I've been riding bikes since I was 8...that was 50 years ago. I've fixed my own flats that whole time; I've gotten flats from all sorts of things including nails...BUT, I have NEVER had a flat from one object creating more then 2 holes not alone 14. Your lesson one is either a falsified lesson, or you just had the most bazaar flat in the history of flats!!!! Even if you rode on the flat for a short distance there should had been small rips not holes from the rim not the nail, and if that happened the tube would be unrepairable.

Lesson 2 is more about how capable a rider is at fixing flats assuming they can find the hole. I always attempt to fix the flat first instead of going to the spare because I know I can fix a flat faster then replacing the tube and here's how it's done. If you know where the hole is, which I know at least 75% of the time then you don't even have to remove the wheel from the bike if you don't want to, so then you simply remove about half of one side of the tire with area where the hole is in the center of the half. Then you pull out about a 1/4th of the tube so that the area with the hole is in the center of the 1/4th. Take your tube buffer out of your patch kit and lightly buff an area slightly larger then the patch will cover. Next take a alcohol pad and clean the area you just buffed. The next part there are two ways to do it, 1 is with glue on patches the 2nd is with glueless patches, I used only glueless patches for the last 16 or 17 years and they work without fail 100% of the time. SO: 1.) Next take your glue and spread it thinly on an area larger then the patch and wait for it to haze over; once the glue is dry then peel off the patch touching the smallest area of the patch and place the center of the patch over the hole. OR 2.) peel off the glueless patch being careful to only touch the smallest area you can on the corner of the patch and place the center of the patch over the hole. (as you can see glueless patch is faster because there is no waiting for the glue to dry). Next press the patch and tube between your thumb and index finger as hard as you can for 30 seconds, then check for frosty looking areas on the patch, if you see a frosty area then press that area(s) for 30 seconds. Reinstall the tube, then put tire back on rim, inflate and your good to go.

There is always going to be an argument about glueless patches. If you use either Park, Specialized, or 3M brand you will never have a failure if you prep the tube as I outlined above. The reason people don't like glueless patches is because they fail to prep the tube correctly and the patch will fail in about a week to maybe 3 months. Or use some cheap Walmart type of glueless patch. Do it as I outlined above and the patch will NEVER fail.

I use to race bikes in the days of freewheels where 5, 6 and 7 speed freewheels were the only thing available, I still have older bikes with those, I also have a newer road bike with a cassette system with more gears. I can tell you this, you can't increase your average speed by 2mph by switching from 5 to 7 or 5 to 9. Your average speed may have increased because of several unknown factors to you, but it wasn't the gears. You may have had a mild backside breeze, you may have a good day physically and your body was just ticking along, or you may have psyched yourself into thinking the gears were better and you drove yourself harder. More then likely it was the old rim being so out of round and probably heavier then then new rim so that combination of problems now gone that made you faster...but it wasn't the gearing.
 
That's a good tip to do the patch job while keeping the wheel mounted. I guess my lesson from my rather bizarre flat should have been to check the tube all the way around at the point of the damage for any sort of puncture caused by whatever strange sharp objects the tube might be in contact with. As for my average, you've got me puzzled there. If my low gear is now a 28 where I used to have a 32, and my speed bottoms out at around 10 mph on a climb when it sometimes used to drop below 8 on the same hills when I used that low 32, then it stands to reason that I climb faster on these gears. Further, when I used to top out my cadence in one gear at say 17-18 mph on a flat, but I couldn't get into cadence in the next gear until about 21-22 mph, which I couldn't maintain because I'm not in that condition yet, it makes sense that now that I have a gear that puts me in cadence at 19-20 mph, this would logically suggest that I cover flats faster than I used to when I had to stay in the slower gear to keep a good cadence. I am however a totally inexperience rookie, with barely 250 miles under my belt, so my logical conclusion that slightly faster climbs plus slightly faster flats equals a slightly faster average must be flawed in some way that I have not the experience to divine. Oh well, I'll just fix my bizarre flats and pedal on in my ignorant inexperienced bliss! :)
 
Keep in mind, I only do the flat repair with the wheel on the bike if I can locate the leak fast, sometimes I can't, so then the wheel comes off so I can remove the tube to inflate outside the tire to try to find the leak. Even if I have to remove the tube I still rather attempt to fix the leak first rather then using the spare tube. At that point it's faster to replace the tube, but I'm not racing so a fast flat repair is not necessary, it probably takes a minute or two longer to fix the tube then it is to replace it if I'm pulling the tube. The way I see it though is once I have the tube out of the tire why go through the routine of rolling the tube up and getting all the air out and then placing it back in the seat bag only to unpack the seat bag when I get home fix the tube and repack it again! Ehh, I'm lazy, so I would rather get the patching done with on the side of the road.

On your gearing, with the 5 speed you had a 32 (we'll call that the first cog) to 14 (we'll call that the 5th cog) spread out over 5 cogs, then you switched to 28 to 14 spread out over 6 cogs. Now follow this carefully, on the 5 speed you probably had, depending on the cog set but just for an example, a 32, 26, 21,17, & 14 teeth gear. On the Shimano, again an example, you have 28, 24, 22, 20, 18,16, & 14, Note the difference between the second cog on the 5 speed of 26 vs the 28 use use on the 6 speed. Two extra teeth from 26 to 28 would not gain you 10 mph, you would only gain between 1 to 2 mph and the 32 to 28 about 2 to 3 mph.

See this site: http://sheldonbrown.com/gears/ This site has a slight problem in that it doesn't have calculations for 5 and 6 speed clusters, so choose the 7 speed F sequence gear spread because that one covers both gears in question the 32 and the 28. I didn't know your chain ring sizes so I entered 53 and 42; and I entered 100 rpm again not knowing your normal cadence; and the crank I put in at 172.5 which is about average. Hit the calculate button which will take you to a different page, now note the speed difference between a 32 and 28. And if climbing a steep hill as you say your RPM probably drops, thus the difference in speed is only 1 mph at 60 rpm! The cadence with a smaller tooth cog, the 28 going up the same hill as you did with the 32 would actually slow your cadence down. Anyway play with the calculator, maybe I'm doing something wrong and you can prove that I am, if you do let me know the factors you plugged in. Thanks
 
I've experienced several flats when biking and one time a rolled over a piece of wood with a nail on it it punctured the tube and was attached to the exterior so, I can't do anything about it since i didn't bring my car which has a spare so I just went home and fixed it the next day.