OldsCOOL

I'm on the subject of tires here in my little world and got to remembering some of the flat tires and what caused them. My most unusual was after a 50mi ride and that next morning the back tire was flat. All I could find was one nearly invisible "cat-whisker" wire barely protruding into the tire chamber. I have no idea how or where but it was enough to deflate that tire quicker than a Patriot's ball on the sidelines. Sure glad to have made it home. Probably from a radial tire blowout along the side of the road.

I know your story is more unusual than mine. What made it go flat??

Wanderer

A splinter, after crossing a wooden path bridge over the river..................

skidder

Ever seen a construction zone barricade like the image I've attached below? With supports made from angle iron? I was on a busy highway with wide shoulders where someone had turned it sideways for the weekend, and it blended in with the background buildings, trees, and other stuff. This made the angle iron bottom pieces stick out on the shoulder where I was riding, and I hit them square-on with my bike. No tire damages, but got two simultaneous flat tires. The tires survived (26 inch street tires on a road-converted MTB), but the tubes ruptured so badly they could not be patched. Lucky I had two spare tubes with me and was able to get rolling again.


https://images.clipartof.com/small/25085-Clipart-Illustration-Of-A-White-And-Orange-Striped-Road-Block-Type-III-Barricade-Board-With-A-Blank-Sign-In-A-Construction-Zone.jpg

JanMM

We suffered our first two on-the-road tandem flats last summer caused by one of those sneaky little wires that just barely went through the tire, including the kevlar belt. Couldn't find the source of the first flat and then suffered the second flat ten miles down the road. Closer inspection found the little bugger. (We've ridden tandems since 2000.)

TGT1

A safety pin.

Fortunately about a block and a half from home at the end of a 90+ mile ride.

woodcraft

Not that odd, but it got my attention on a fast descent.


I also put snake bite holes in a big exercise ball by rolling back onto the sharp ends of folded rollers.

StephenH

When I was in high school and college, part of my work was fixing truck flats at a dump-truck place. About half the flats would be due to rocks that had worked their way through the tire. The other half were various bits of metal. Including a small C-clamp, a screwdriver, a railroad spike, etc. I started saving the metal bits and think I still have them around here somewhere.

StanSeven

I brought a new bike with Michelin plastic rim strap/tape instead of the typical cloth material. I started getting flats and couldn't figure out why. It turned out the rim tape dried out and developed very fine cracks the inflated tube could work into.

OldsCOOL

Wut

EvilWeasel

Pointy hat from a lawn gnome. Twice.

Doug64

I had a similar flat; smaller nail, but it nailed my tire to the rim. The nail pierced the inner wall of the rim.

North Coast Joe

My trainer!

Two flats this season on a trainer!?! OK, on the first I found a dried out patch that leaked...but the second was a puncture.

You must think I'm housekeeping-challenged if I get puncture flats on a trainer! Couldn't find anything in the tire or tube except the hole. Gotta' stop rolling through those bad neighborhoods.

John E

In recent years I have had a few innertubes start to leak around the base of the valve stem. Sometimes I'll hear the sound of a sudden air leak, hours or days after I last used the bike in question. Nothing has changed -- the rims and rim strips are in good shape, and I avoid applying excessive force against the valve stem while using a tire pump. (I normally use one of the floor pumps; the only time I use a frame pump is when I am out on the road.) I wonder if innertube quality has declined, or whether some of my tubes had exceeded their shelf life. Weird ... .

irwin7638

At a club ride, I took my bike off the rack on my car, was talking with a few people before we got started and hisssssssss! It was so weird we all just stared at it for a minute. I changed it real quick and went on. Later I found a tiny hole near the stem, but nothing to cause it.

Marc

OldsCOOL

thanx for the chuckle this morning!

radeln

Bang! An older tube with many patches blew the entire stem off the tube while the bike was parked. Replaced it with an equally-old tube, which blew the valve stem off the same way a few days later. New tubes in the same wheel have been fine.

Long, long ago, had a tube that kept getting punctures on the inner side of the tube. Eventually realized it must be burrs on the spoke holes, ground them all down, and that finally stopped it. That was probably before I knew about Velox rim tape.

gif4445

How about not reading the pump gauge correctly? My nephew and I were playing cards in our cheap pop-up camper the night before the start of a charity ride. Then BOOM! A tire on his bike exploded. He had just pumped up the tire about 30 minutes prior. We thought maybe just some age and such on the tube. The next day, I watched him as he pumped up his tire. Looked at the gauge and Holy &^^%! "I think you need reading glasses Doug!" What he thought was 110 was actually closer to 140.

Whiteknight

A woman's gold earring on the SRT one weekend.

OldsCOOL

Oh man.

I had a pump like that and was all I used in my earlier years. My Trek 460 had Vredestein Ricorso 23's with a folding bead, excellent training tires. While on a longer ride I hear a strange WUB WUB WUB coming from down near the front brake. The bead had lifted and a freaky black bulge getting bigger and bigger, dragging by the brake caliper. Of course, as soon as I hit the brake there was a pop and hiss.

That was when I backed pressure down 10psi. This has been the only flat on the front for me, ever.

groth

A few years ago, I was on the FANY ride in upstate NY. It was a newly paved road. I had just come down a small hill and was just going up the other side. No traffic, pleasant scenery, smooth pavement, and I was just enjoying the ride and I guess I went into daydreaming mode when all of a sudden, my front wheel went off the edge of the pavement - a 2-3 inch drop to the gravel. I should have just ridden off the road, stopped and got back on. But, instincts took over and I jerked the wheel to the left. Somehow, it got back on the pavement. I was all over the road for a few minutes, but finally got it straightened out and after calming down, I heard a thumping with each wheel rotation. I looked and saw the inner tube coming out between the rim and the tire. I had apparently knocked the tire partially off the rim. More and more tube was coming out. I had just figured out I needed to stop and let the air out when there was a huge BANG as the tube exploded. There was a tandem not too far behind. They said it sounded like a *** shot!

- Ed

Shamrock

On the mountain bike I found a claw belonging to an animal.Maybe a squirrel.or to make it interesting could have been a mountain lion.

Retro Grouch 

The most interesting puncture that I can remember was a bayonet sized shard of glass from a broken beer bottle that penetrated the ride-like-an-ox-cart Armadillo on our tandem. Those itty bitty wire things - unfortunately I don't think they are all that unusual but they sure can be hard to find in your tire.

groth

How come we can't use the word g u n??? I hear shots all the time when I'm riding during hunting season. It's a legitimate word! Political correctness run amok!

fietsbob

The IDK one I cured by just putting a thick TR Inner tube in after never finding why it was happening with the tire inspection.

Blues Frog

You mean it is against the rules to say ************* Won't be here again. Don't need foaming at the mouth liberalism. Call it PC if you will.