(((((SLIME))))))
john
In Feb 06 I had the misfortune to ride through a goat head patch. When
all was said & done I lost count @ ~25 punctures. I was near a bus
route that allowed me to get a ride home. I threw both tubes away,
carefully removed all the spines & bought 3 Bontrager / Slime 26 x 1.95
-2.35 Superlight tubes & installed them in the front & rear tire &
seat pack. I am not aware of any punctures till Aug. I spent a month in
Boise, Id, till early Sept. 06. During that month I again got ~25 goats
head & thorn punctures at different times, but in groups. Not one of
the 3 tubes has been patched to this date. In fact the original tube I
put into the seat pack is still unused. Not once did I fail to reach my
home base, although one time the rear tire was a little low. Due to the
uphill climb, my speed was low, which gave the Slime a good opportunity
to patch the holes. After removing the thorns I would slowly rotated
the tires & would be able to pump them up to full pressure. The
punctures were usually discovered after arriving home.
I've always felt that Slime works, but I wasn't as certain as I am now.
I'm somewhat surprised @ the various reports that Slime doesn't work.
Specialized or Stan's may work better, but I would hate to loose the
fluorescents that Slime gives to help spot where the punctures are, to
aid in removing the spines.
Comments? John
carl...@comcast.net
Dear John,
Slime helps on 700c tires, but not as well as it seems to work on your
wider and possibly knobby MTB tires.
On narrower 700c tires, goatheads have a nasty habit of sticking up at
an angle through the sidewall. The Slime doesn't work as well away
from the contact patch.
And some goathead punctures will simply fail to seal.
It's nice to find a few sealed punctures when a tube finally goes
flat, but in the end they do go flat. Water tends to help dissolve
sealed punctures.
Here's a recent post tacked onto a larger thread about goatheads:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.bicycles.tech/msg/f53b67a7fc5dfa7a
And here's the next day:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.bicycles.tech/msg/53b54e579b282e25
That little tell-tale drop of lurid green does make it hard to pretend
that there's no puncture.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
john
-snip-
> Dear John,
>
> Slime helps on 700c tires, but not as well as it seems to work on your
> wider and possibly knobby MTB tires.
>
And lower pressure. Yes they are wide knobbies, 2.35 Ritchie Z max on
the front, & IRC Mythos 1.95 r K on the rear (3/4 worn out).
Do you slowly spin the a afflicted as the pressure is going down to
give the Slime a chance to do it's thing. I've found this to be very
helpful.
Best wishes, John
carl...@comcast.net
Dear John,
A 700c touring tire is usually spinning briskly after it impales a
goathead.
You can stop and try to turn the tire to place the hole at the bottom
and even tilt it for a goathead off-center.
But once you hear the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of a puncture whipping
around (often accompanied by a spray of green Slime), the only
solution is to stop, put in a spare tube, and repeat until you reach
home or run out of tubes and patches.
The thinner casing of typical 700c tires versus typical mountain bike
tires may make them less likely to seal.
Similarly, the constant direct contact of a 700c with the road tends
to pull the fibers mixed in with the Slime away from the hole that
they're trying to clog. On a knobby tire, the actual hole is likely to
be off the ground, undisturbed, and more easily sealed.
I just went through a batch of punctured Slime tubes, inflating them,
dunking them in the sink, and sticking toothpicks in the holes.
Dry and undisturbed, most of them inflated slightly and showed no
problems.
Dunked in the sink, many of them still showed no problem.
Inflated further and expanded, with the water helping to dissolve
clogs, all but one of them abruptly sprang a leak (or several leaks).
A few that have been patched later failed testing, usually when I
noticed a tiny wisp of fiber on the dry tube in a good light.
The one tube that shows no leak is going to be re-tested brutally.
Somewhere, I suspect, there's a white wisp of fiber and a delivate
little pinhole that's plugged. If I tried to use it on the road, I
expect that fitting it into the tire would cause the plug to fail just
when I needed it most.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
Bob Huntley
into a major rip of the tube.
<carl...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:7kgsg29kvrss4e79d...@4ax.com...
john
'delivate'? Huh?
I see your points. I suspect that the 8 to 10 bars vs. 2 to 3 bars has
something to do with it, as well.
So apparently Slime doesn't work very well on the road. ("On the road
again...." W. Nelson.) (How can I make a music symbol ?)
Have you or anyone tried Stan's or Specialized in road tires?
Regards, John
john
Bob Huntley wrote:
> In my case it glued the tube to the tyre cover and turned a small puncture
> into a major rip of the tube.
Never had that problem, John
carl...@comcast.net
<bob.h...@btinternet.com> wrote:
>In my case it glued the tube to the tyre cover and turned a small puncture
>into a major rip of the tube.
Dear Bob,
Odd.
You may be blaming the Slime for an unrelated problem.
Slime is quite slippery. When it leaks out between the punctured tube
and the inside of the tire, it acts as a lubricant, not a glue. I
usually wipe a thin film of Slime out of the inside of the my tire
after a flat.
Slime clogs small punctures mostly by transporting very fine white
fibers to the hole. Indeed, with a small enough puncture, all you'll
see is a tiny wisp of white fiber sticking out. The process is
somewhat like clogging a drain pipe by pouring molasses full of
chopped-up rope down the sink.
A butyl inner tube can stick to the tire if left in place long enough,
sometimes hard enough to tear when you peel it out after a puncture.
My tubes don't stay in place long enough to stick to the inside of my
tires because I average 20-50 flats per year.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
carl...@comcast.net
Dear John,
Proofreading vosts extra.
The ASVII musival note symbols are trivky, sinve the vomputer is
likely to treat them as varriage returns and other commands instead of
displaying them:
http://www.jimprice.com/jim-asc.htm
Slime works well enough in road tires that I've used it for years.
But my daily ride has a fair number of goatheads, rovk vhips, glass
fragments, Russian olive thorns, staples, nails, fish-hooks, and other
debris.
Varl Fogel
dvt
> Slime is quite slippery. When it leaks out between the punctured tube
> and the inside of the tire, it acts as a lubricant, not a glue. I
> usually wipe a thin film of Slime out of the inside of the my tire
> after a flat.
>
> Slime clogs small punctures mostly by transporting very fine white
> fibers to the hole. Indeed, with a small enough puncture, all you'll
> see is a tiny wisp of white fiber sticking out. The process is
> somewhat like clogging a drain pipe by pouring molasses full of
> chopped-up rope down the sink.
I'll preface by saying I've never used Slime.
If the liquid component of Slime is a lubricant, how do you get a patch
to stick? I imagine that some of the lubricant escapes the puncture,
contaminates the exterior of the tube, and prevents adhesion. Perhaps
you use a solvent? Or is the classic sandpaper approach sufficient?
--
Simply curious,
Dave
dvt at psu dot edu
john
I thought maybe that you were using some very obscure word, that I had
no idea what it meant, & I was slightly chiding you for that, &
curious. You rarely make typos. What were you aiming for?
And I still wonder if the other products might be better?
Regards, John
Bill Sornson
> carl...@comcast.net wrote:
{snips taken}
>> Proofreading vosts extra.
> I thought maybe that you were using some very obscure word, that I had
> no idea what it meant, & I was slightly chiding you for that, &
> curious. You rarely make typos. What were you aiming for?
Probably an /Alan Braggins/ kinda thing. <eg>
carl...@comcast.net
Dear Dave,
The Slime itself doesn't soak into or through the rubber, so just
wiping it off seems to work. Like you, I wondered about how well
patching would work, but I finally decided that the only way to find
out was to try it--it seems to work well enough that even a clumsy
patcher like me can do it.
I yank the tubes from the tire, replace them with good tubes from my
frame bag, and carry them home for patching.
By evil coincidence, I read your post just after I came up from the
basement, where five Rema patches are kissing five Slime tubes through
a tacky layer of Rema patch glue.
Five earlier tubes cured overnight and held modest test pressure.
Basically, you squeeze the Slime-and-fiber mix away from the puncture,
wipe the tube clean, introduce the tube to the sandpaper for luck,
slather the glue on, wait five minutes, slap the patch on hopefully,
and come back the next day.
I use the large round end of this vise as a work table for patching
five tubes at a time:
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=5655
With the vise closed, the round end sticks out 5 & 1/2 inches and is 2
& 1/2 inches wide. I expect that a cheap piece of white PVC plumbing
pipe would work well, too--I just want a solid, rounded surface that
holds the tube up at a convenient height.
(I had fifteen tubes ready for patching yesterday, since I fondly
imagine that an assembly-line approach saves time, increases
reliability, and yields at least a few successfully patched and tested
tubes.)
Given my poor skills and bad luck with mechanical matters, my patch
success rate is quite good. After one distaster that broke a spark
plug wrench, a friend who's a former motorcycle mechanic commented
that my ancestors were probably cursed by a blacksmith. If so, the
blacksmith may have had a brother who worked at a glue factory, since
almost nothing that I try to glue stays together.
But the Rema patches and glue from BikeToolsEtc have surprised me by
pretty much doing what they're supposed to do. I'm over half-way
through a box of 100 of the smaller fp0 patches for 700c tires:
http://www.biketoolsetc.com/index.cgi?id=440435462942&d=single&c=Tire-Tube&sc=Repair-Kits-and-Supplies&tc=Patches&item_id=RE-F0P
or http://tinyurl.com/fsvef
The fp0 probably stands for f(eathered) p(atch size #)0, as opposed to
the larger fp1 patches:
Here's the Rema glue:
http://www.biketoolsetc.com/index.cgi?id=440435462942&d=single&c=Tire-Tube&sc=Repair-Kits-and-Supplies&tc=Cement&item_id=RE-203
or http://tinyurl.com/gvgv9
For most posters, 100 patches and an 8 ounce can of glue might be
overkill, but I get a lot of flats.
I don't use it, but fanatics might try the Rema liquid rubber buffer:
http://www.biketoolsetc.com/index.cgi?id=440435462942&d=single&c=Tire-Tube&sc=Repair-Kits-and-Supplies&tc=Rubber-Buffer&item_id=RE-71
or http://tinyurl.com/hb96s
You can browse for smaller quantities at BikeToolsEtc--just search for
"Rema".
As for on-the-road patching, I've only had to do that once after
several flats ate up all four of my spare tubes.
I pulled the little Park glueless patch kit out, read the directions,
and apprehensively gave the clear plastic rectangle a try--it worked
like a charm for me, though other posters complain about problems with
glueless patches.
http://www.performancebike.com/shop/Profile.cfm?SKU=942&item=00-6856&slitrk=search&slisearch=true
or http://tinyurl.com/g4586
I bought my $3 Park patch kit from Performance, but lots of other
places sell them. The little plastic case is tiny, flat, quite
convenient, and a considerable comfort when I'm replacing my second
flat on a 15-mile ride.
One reason for tossing a Slime tube in the trash is more punctures to
patch than seems reasonable. Where goatheads flourish, a tube can look
as if it lost a fight with a porcupine, with half a dozen punctures
revealed when the tube is tested by inflating and dunking in a sink.
The other reason for throwing a Slime tube away is the annoying
puncture right next to the valve stem, up on the sidewall. Even if I
got the patch to stick, I'd probably pull it loose fiddling it into
the tire and wiggling the valve stem around, so I don't even tempt the
gods of mechanical failure by trying.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
carl...@comcast.net
Dear John,
Typos van be a delivate and trivky matter, but some keys lice right
next to eavh other. Vonfronted by a strange word, the vurious are well
adcised to peek at the key in question and vonsider its immediate
neighbors.
Other sealants may be better, but they aren't as widely acailable for
bivyvles. Google for "tire sealant" and you'll find some alternatices.
Vheers,
Varl Fogel
R Brickston
Carl, you would be the perfect candidate for a set of those dumb
airless tires will probably can never be developed into something
usable.
carl...@comcast.net
<rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@> wrote:
Dear R.,
It may pay to keep an open mind.
I thought poorly of airless tires . . .
But Lewis Campbell recently posted that he's been using something
quite similar for five years quite happily in Texas:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.bicycles.misc/msg/573f47bd31730465
Lewis's experience in how usable Airfree tires are makes Jobst's
comment look a bit ignorant.
It's worth mentioning that I would have looked twice as ignorant.
Cheers,
Carl Fogel
R Brickston
Well, now goatheads where I ride. So where's ?your? set?
R Brickston
<rb20170REMOVE.yahoo.com@> wrote:
Jeez... let me try that again:
Well, no goatheads where I ride. So, where's /your/ set?