I have not been having good bicycle luck. Since Friday I’ve ruptured five innertubes and had two tire levers snap. The flats have forced me to walk through the cold, then the rain, then the cold again; I’ve had to skip appointments and be late to work and walk in bad shoes until my feet ache. My fingers are suffused with brake dust; my hands look like they belong to a Pompeiian mummy.
And yet! I am now so much faster at changing tires, and this feeling of accomplishment almost makes up for all of the hassle. The operation requires finesse, see, and you tend to accidentally hurt yourself and waste time and materials when you’re still getting the hang of it. But now I have the hang of it! I don’t do those things anymore! It’s great!
Well, alright, I’m still wasting materials at a phenomenal clip. But there’s a reliable and thoroughly pleasant honeymoon period of about forty minutes before the newly-installed innertube explodes, and that’s enough for basking. Tomorrow the offending rim goes back to the bike shop and people who objectively know what they’re doing; for now, for me, the subjective experience is going to have to be sufficient.
I assume you’ve checked the tire itself thoroughly for protruding nasties? It could easily be that the strip on the inside of the wheel that keeps the tube from getting abraded by the spoke ends has worn through in spots.
Yeah — I’ve checked the tire fairly carefully, but have mostly paid attention to the rim, as the ruptures seem to be consistently occurring about an inch from the base of the valve stem on the inside of the tube. I’m using a Schrader-to-Presta rim adapter, but the rupture is a little ways away from that, so I don’t think that’s the problem. The rim tape at the spot in question looks fine to me, but I must be missing something. I don’t have any rim tape on hand anyway, though, so I may as well have the guys at the bike shop take a look at it.
(This is all the bike shop’s fault, incidentally, for giving me this stupid bargain-barrel Schrader-drilled rim to replace the basic but perfectly lovely Presta one I had prior to getting hit — this despite my specific instructions to go hog wild on insurance company money. Bah!)
Hoverbikes were supposed to solve all of these problems…
Wait, Jeff, are you telling me they don’t have them in California?