On Punctures

Last night I had to stop at a red light, yes I do obey the law, as I was riding home from work. Once the light turned green the road suddenly felt an awful lot bumpier - too rough actually. I looked down and sure enough, the back tyre, always the back tyre, was completely flat.

I pulled over and took the wheel off and began that pain in the rear end job that makes the pain of riding 200km seem like a walk in the park. If you have never had to change an inner tube and you own a road bike you are:

1. Exceedingly lucky
2. Going to have to learn how soon enough, probably at the side of the road somewhere far from home.

The process of changing an inner tube is simple enough but still not something anyone enjoys doing, especially at the side of the road. The tube change I performed yesterday went something like this:

1. I used a tyre leaver to unseat the tyre from the rim on one side.
2. I pulled the tube out of the rim and inspected the tube for leaks.
3. I tried to partially pump the tube with my Axiom Hybrid pump, only the damned hand pump is busted, have to get that replaced, so I ended up blowing into the valve mouth to valve - YUMMY!!
4. Blowing as hard as I could I just could not get enough pressure to see a hole, so I had to visually inspect the tyre and sure enough, there was a nice metal fragment embedded in the tyre, perhaps a fraction of a millimeter thick and only a few millimeters on each side, but that is all you need. I pulled the fragment out of the tyre and tossed the tube.
5. I seated a new tube in the tyre and reseated the tyre.
6. I tried to prime the tube by hand inflating with the pump, but as I said above (step 3) the pump is busted.
7. I tried to inflate the tube with my CO2 cartridge but nothing happened - it turned out at some point in the past the pump had punctured the cartridge and now the cartridge was empty.
8. I got out my second spare cartridge but when I went to discharge that one the damned pump must have had some obstruction the air came out too slowly and ended up leaking from the stem as fast as it came in from the pump.
9. I unseated the tube to see if something was wrong there, nothing was, and reseated the tyre and tube.
10. By this point a passer-by who lived near by offered to get me his floor pump, very nice of him, I accepted his offer, while using my very last CO2 cartridge (yes I have three cartridges thank goodness!).
11. By the time my friendly floor pump had arrived my third and final cartridge had worked and my tyre was up around 100 maybe even 110psi. Lucky! (The floor pump as it turned out was not designed to exceed maybe 80psi.)

When I got home I took that 290 TPI Vittoria Tyre that I just got a month ago at the bike show and put it in the basement. I took out my old 290 TPI Vittoria Tyre from last year and put it on. This was the third tube replacement in under a month, something has to be wrong with that damned tyre, it seems to let every confounded thing puncture tubes. Conversely my front wheel has, touch wood, been fine. Of course the front wheel is fine, it is always the back wheel that fails, by the same law that says the buttered side of the toast will always land on the floor.