Sunday, October 28, 2007

A Hole in One



Flats are normally no big deal when you ride a bike. You ride over a thorn, a piece of glass, a shard of metal, the tire goes soft, you swap inner tubes and ride on.

But I can’t remember ever getting a flat before from such a big tree branch.

Heck, it doesn’t even have a sharp point.

I swapped inner tubes and rode on.

2 comments:

CaliforniaGirl said...

From the looks of the tread, you might want a new tire soon anyway.

mrjumbo said...

No, that's a new tire. It may not show in the picture, but the tire is only a few months old. Tread is still in excellent shape.

You'll notice that the stick punctured at a gap in the tread pattern. One reason I like this particular tread pattern is that it has good stout raised areas all along the crown of the tire--the area most likely to hit small sharp stuff on the pavement. That means an ordinary thorn is a lot less likely to get through to the inner tube and give me a flat.

The tire is designed that way to give me lower roll resistance when riding on pavement, but I appreciate the puncture resistance too. (The idea of the tread pattern is that on softer soil the tread on the shoulders of the tire will still give good traction, but on pavement these tires will roll a little faster and easier than proper dirt-bike knobbies.)