djb

I have very clear evidence of stopping after running over glass, laying my touring bike on its side, and dislodging a just started too embed itself piece of glass from my tire.
tons of times
so while I've never done the reach down and clean off tire with glove thing, my stationary thing is doing the same thing, just slower.

Jonathan Hanson 

Er, well . . . I didn't intend my post to be a scientific challenge, but as it happens I've taught (4x4) tire repair to several hundred people at the Overland Expos over the years, and have written a score or more articles on the subject, and engineers at several tire companies confirmed the phenomenon. So not actually just "one person's cool story." If you choose not to believe it it's of course your choice.

boomhauer

or you could buy a pair of Mr. Tuffy's tire liners and never worry about it again.

staehpj1

Just as well since IME in the realm of cycling forums many of the data driven ones seem to use flawed logic and misinterpreted data any way.

harvillo

I’ve struggled with this as well. I opt for a tire which mounts easily, period. For instance, I love contis, but they are a pita with my wheels so I went with a tire that’s nice (but not as nice) yet a breeze to mount. If it takes more than 5 minutes to have a tire off then I’m over it. I’ve also had great luck with wheel liners. In fact, I can’t remember ever having a puncture when using them (other than the giant piece of metal that went into my sidewall) which looked to be something used in road construction.

CargoDane

I recently bought a Schwalbe Billy Bonkers (20"). I was shocked how easy it was. In fact, it was so "loose" that I thought I had received the wrong 20" (i.e. the larger 20"). I have to admit, that I would have preferred a bit tighter fit out of slight fear of (a lack of) retention at lower pressures. I mean, I don't even need a lever to take off the deflated tyre.

pdlamb

But but but...

Aren't three anecdotes equivalent to five data points??

djb

and apparently nowadays, seven easily disseminated heresays are more than equal to both. Social Media and all ya know. Add in repetition and you're golden.

andrewclaus

Mathematically, yes. Grammatically, I've heard "The plural of 'anecdote' is 'data.'"

cyccommute 

Goathead. Aka Tribulus terrestris. Around here we call them tackburrs as well. Nasty little buggers. They grow in disturbed soils but don’t like competition. As soon as grass grows over the disturbed ground, they go dormant and call lay fallow for up to 50 years and still germinate. They probably came here in Russian wheat.

cyccommute 

Amateur! Some of the highlights of my travails with the mighty gods of flats:

-to begin with, I have gone through 2 boxes (100 each) of Rema patches, and am well into my 3 box, in the last 10 years.

-I started out the morning with a flat that I had to patch before I broke camp. I got less than 10 feet down the road with a loaded bike when I heard the pop of another puncture.

-3 or 4 blowouts in 26 miles. The first one was just 2 miles from the start in front of a car tire shop...scared the guy outside. One stampeded cows but at least I’d made it about 20 miles and the last one was overnight during a torrential rain storm with lightning so close that I could hear the thunder before I saw the lightning. There may have been another one in there somewhere. Spent the night in the brick bathroom of the campground. I was prepared for flats but not for that many blowouts. Someone was nice enough to give me a ride to town where I got 6 tubes and didn’t have a flat over the next two weeks.

-A blowout on the top of Lolo Pass after I fixed a flat on my daughter’s bike. 50 miles from anywhere. (Both of these incidents happened with Continental touring tires which I will not use again)

-a day trip into goathead country here in Colorado. We had 4 people and 24 flats. My wife got one...I forgot a tire liner one of her tires..., the guy running ghetto tubeless got 3 and his girlfriend got 20. Again, I plan for flats and bring extra tubes as well as lots and lots (and lots) of patches. She blew through all of them and more. She finally had to resort to pumping up the tire and riding as fast as she could to cover as much distance as possible before having to pump up again. It was a slow final 3 miles (out of 8 total). When we got to the trailhead, I did a little happy dance because if you do the math, you discover that I had zero flats.

-which brings me to the sad moral of the next ride into the same area. Because I had mocked the mighty god of flats and his goathead attendants, they did smiteth me mightily! In the same 8 miles, I stopped counting at 63 goathead punctures on one tire! I had to actually carry the bike the last mile because the tires came off the rims. I had to throw away the tires, tubes and tire liner. There were just too many goatheads and goathead spines imbedded in all of them.

The mighty god of flats and his goathead attendants can be appeased, however. I have since gone into the same area with Slime filled tubes, tire liners and sacrificial tires...old tires I will just throw away after the ride... and not experienced a single flat nor even picking up a single goathead. If you are willing to ride on awful tires that weight a ton and aren’t all that responsive, the mighty god of flats might be appeased.

On the plus side, I’m really, really, really good at fixing flats!

Tourist in MSN

A couple years ago I did the ACA Big Bend van supported trip in West Texas. Second night, I accidentally rode my bike into the campsite instead of getting off the bike while still on pavement and walking into the campsite. Spent the next 10 minutes removing the thorns that I collected in the campsite, photo below.



I was more careful for the rest of the trip.

The group was over a dozen riders, and there was only one person that had a flat, and she only had one.

I was amazed how lucky we all were.

Before the trip, we were warned to expect flats on our sleeping pads too, I do not know if anyone had a pad puncture, I did not. They suggested a foam pad underneath any inflatable pads, some people did that but I did not, instead I rolled the dice that I could pick a good tent site each night. I had a plastic sheet under my tent, that collected some thorns.

I need to also thank you for having some of my flats for me, made my touring much more enjoyable. If I meet you in a campground sometime, remind me that I owe you a couple beers.