J.Higgins 

Thookie the Wookie!

I'll mirror what Mad Honk and others have said about trying a patch, and here is how I would do it:

1. Turn tire inside out.
2. Rub the are to be patched thoroughly with acetone. I would use a nonwoven abrasive pad for this and nothing more aggressive so as not to disturb the remaining threads any more than I had to.
3. Apply rubber cement, and wait until it dries. Let it completely dry.
4. Apply another coat, and wait until this coat is dry enough so that nothing comes off when you touch it with your finger. Keep that finger out of your nose.
5. Apply the patch.
6. Roll and press the patch with a ball peen hammer using light taps. Try to get the patch really pressed firmly to the tire carcass.
7. Inflate the tire to full pressure and let it sit over night to cure and harden

The two-coat of glue technique was learned at my old high school job in a shoe store. We did custom heels and arch supports and wedges and a whole bunch of stuff we never would have had to put up with if there had been any foot doctors in town. My boss bought the store from an elderly man who ran it for 60 years. There was a fascinating array of shoe stretchers and devices to manipulate the fit of a shoe. If you had a bunion, we had a device that could stretch that area. Needless to say, I learned a lot and the two-coat glue technique was one of them.

Honestly, this procedure should do the trick. When I was a kid growing up in Maine, I was like ten years younger than all of the kids of the people that my mother knew. My parents didnt have me until they had been married for ten years, and subsequently, life went on for all of their friends. This meant that all of my mom's friends had bikes just lying around when their kids grew up, went off to school, got married, and left home, and went on with their lives. So my mother would ask them if I could have those bikes and she would bring them home to me. My mother knew a lot of people, so pretty soon, I had a couple dozen bikes by the time I was 11 or 12. I fixed up bikes for me and all of the kids I knew. The trouble was back then - it is for many people now - lack of money. So I had to be inventive and make things work that would ordinarily justify a replacement part. Much was the case for tires.

I can't count how many times I patched tires and have sewn up sidewalls with my mother's "Aunt Lydia's thread." The neighbor worked as a mechanic somewhere and with four boys and two girls in that family, they were poorer than us. I supplied each one of those kids with a bike. You would laugh at how many patches we had on some of those tubes!