Milk As A Tire Sealant
Ray Bowman
Jeff Napier (bike...@aol.com) (Date: 8 Aug 1997 06:15:05 GMT) wrote:
>In response to another thread about the effectiveness of liquid tire
>sealants, I have heard that ordinary milk works well. I haven't tried it
>myself, probably because of a story an old-timer related.
I have heard this also - and some have also used oatmeal. Further, I once
had a conversation with a rider who had used water in his tubes!
Desperate people use desperate means.
While the water use does appear to be utterly rediculous, here is the
rider's reasons. His flat problems were dominated by thorns. The water
slowed some small leaks enough to allow him to finish his ride. When the
holes were too large to allow this, the water bled to the surface allowed
him to locate the leak so he could patch his tube by simply pulling the
tube out - no need to remove the wheel from the bike and to dismount the
tire to find the leak. He was delighted to learn that there were bike
tire sealants much more effective than water (or milk, or even oatmeal).
Modern sealants provide virtually perfect protection for thorns, and some
will seal most holes made by 1/8 inch nails. And when they fail, the
patching is usually easier because there will normally be some sealant
bleed to show where the hole is.
Ray
Biketune
In response to another thread about the effectiveness of liquid tire
sealants, I have heard that ordinary milk works well. I haven't tried it
myself, probably because of a story an old-timer related.
fit tires, put milk in their bike inner tubes - lots of milk because they
didn't know how much was enough. Months later, this fellow had a blowout,
which sprayed lots of the stinkiest old milk imaginable all over him.
- Jeff Napier -
Check out http://members.aol.com/biketune for lots of free bicycle repair
techniques - none of which involve milk.
CdaleSR900
Udderly ridiculous!
Jobst Brandt
Jeff Napier writes:
> In response to another thread about the effectiveness of liquid tire
> sealants, I have heard that ordinary milk works well. I haven't tried it
> myself, probably because of a story an old-timer related.
> Seems he and his brother, in the days when all common bicycles had
> fit tires, put milk in their bike inner tubes - lots of milk because
> they didn't know how much was enough. Months later, this fellow had
> a blowout, which sprayed lots of the stinkiest old milk imaginable
> all over him.
Sounds like the experience I had in 1976 and reported here on
wreck.bike. When I was riding my last Clement tubulars, that had poor
stitch protectors that caused many pin hole leaks, my tires kept going
flat. Knowing about the ability of the butterfat in milk to plug such
holes, I poured a few ounces of milk, from a dairy on the Klausen pass
in Switzerland, into my tire pump and pumped it into my tires. This
solved my problem, but a few weeks later, back home, while riding to
Santa Cruz with a bunch of bikies sitting on my wheel, I had a rear
blowout and sprayed them with putrid milk, while I had a hard time
controlling the bike as it slid around on the flat tubular like ice.
This was my encounter with sealant and it taught me that Sealants are
about as slick as butter inside a tube. You can try that by just
feeling the slipperiness of a tube that has the stuff inside.
Are you sure your tale didn't originate from my experience. The event
Sounds so similar.
Jobst Brandt <jbr...@hpl.hp.com>
Anthony Levand
My father used condensed milk as a sealant in his tires years ago, in the
thirties.
Tony
Jobst Brandt <jbr...@hpl.hp.com> wrote in article
<5sgct5$p...@hplms2.hpl.hp.com>...
CdaleSR900
In article <33ec355a...@nnrp.gol.com>, gle...@gol.com.NoSpamPlease
(Geoffrey Levand) writes:
>My father said that when he was young he and his pals would put
>condensed milk in their tubes.
Sounds good with chocolate chip cookies.
Biketune
Regarding spraying the crowd with rotten milk, Jobst wrote:
<<Are you sure your tale didn't originate from my experience. The event
Sounds so similar.>>
I haven't met you yet, but unless you were about sixty-five years old in
Santa Cruz, California about fifteen years ago, it wasn't you:)
I do like your story better though. Much more fun to spray a bunch of
innocent fellow riders than just your brother!
- Jeff -
25 Ways to Make Money with Bicycles at
http://members.aol.com/biketune/money.htm
Adam Zilinskas
>My father said that when he was young he and his pals would put
>condensed milk in their tubes.
Maybe it works like this:
* you put the milk (condensed or not) in your tubes in May
* it was a hot June and July, no matter what that milk is ripe
* in August you are bicycling up to a patch of broken glass.
The sub-conscious realizes it does not want to be around when
that really ripe milk is released from its inner-tube tomb.
You then unconsciously swerve around and avoid the glass.
See the milk prevented a flat.
--
Adam Zilinskas
a...@synario.com
http://www.data-io.com/~aez/
end