Pedal Pushers on Fixing A Flat
Roy and Christine write a long post on fixing flats.
Excerpt:
“Back when I was a kid, bicycles had big tires and tubes. Flats from goat heads were so frequent that to save money, we would just use a tire patch on the tube. Take the wheel off with a pair of pliers, use a screw driver to pry the tire off the wheel, and pull the tube out. You would pump up the tube and dip it in a pail of water, rotating it until you would see little air bubbles escaping from the tube. You have found the hole. Mark the hole by poking a match stick in the hole. After drying off the tube, you would scrape the tube with the top of the tire patch can (looked like a carrot grater) to roughen the surface, apply the glue, strip off the protecting strip from the patch, and hold the patch on tightly until the glue dried. If you were smart, you would test the tube again in the pail of water to see if it still leaked.”