Last week’s ride was cut short by my riding partner’s encounter with a patch of ice.
This week was threatened by a patch on a tire. Or should I say, “in a tire.” Joon rides tubeless, and when you get a puncture that doesn’t self-seal, you can stick a strip of “bacon” in the hole to plug it (just like you would do to a car tire with a hole in it). The plug looks a bit like a twizzled bacon stick, and so its name.
Now, the way tubeless tires work is that you completely seal the tire to the rim by plugging all of the possible leaks in the rim with rim tape (or your wheel may already come with a special rim that doesn’t have the spoke holes), popping the tire onto its bead (a lip on the rim that holds the edge of the tire in place), and injecting 100ml of a liquid sealant that contains fibers that will fill any small cracks and holes. This works great when you’re on the road and you hit a small nail or something else minor — the positive pressure in the tire pushes the sealant to the hole where, if it’s small enough, it does its job and you keep riding like nothing happened. If the hole is bigger and the sealant isn’t working, you pull out the bacon and that usually works.
The problem we first encountered today was that Joon’s rear tire was going soft and we couldn’t find a hole. Holes in tubeless tires should be easy to find — it’s where the milky-colored sealant is seeping out. But we didn’t see anything seeping. So Joon picked up his bike, tilted it each way, and rotated the tire. You do that to run the sealant around the seal between the tire and the rim, and it was then that we saw a bit seeping out along the edge. It wasn’t going to last, and Joon ended up stopping less than a mile later to put in a tube (the last resort for tubeless). It was then that we found the problem when he took off the tire — the inside was just damp with sealant when there should have been a decent little puddle in the bottom.
We kind of count putting in the tube as the second flat, because we already had to stop and fill up the tire once, fiddle with it, and then fill it again. He even burned through a CO2 cartridge to get this far.
Then, just a few miles later, I heard him behind me muttering “you’ve got to be kidding me.” His front tire had a small hole that was spraying a fine mist of sealant. I put my thumb over the hole while Joon pulled out his repair kit. When I took it off, the leak had actually slowed to almost nothing, but he put in the bacon anyway and limped home.
After last week, I’ve decided to call Wil “Crash” (this isn’t the first time he’s wiped out on the bike), but I couldn’t come up with a name for Joon, until I remembered that the Korean word for a flat tire sounds a lot like the English word “Punk.” I’m not sure if it’ll stick.
Other than these problems and the air quality, it was a nice day for a ride. Got into the mid-40s, and the days of bitter cold are probably behind us now (although it’ll probably snow once or twice more before winter’s end). Forty miles was fairly easy today.
Punk and Devastatingly Handsome Old Man