Chris Dean’s Personal Website

I do a lot of cycling every day and I’m fed up up with punctures occurring when I most need my bike to work – namely first thing in the morning when I’m running late for my train to work.

So yesterday I went to Halfords (my local bike superstore) to buy some tyre filler so that when I leave for work in the morning and have a puncture I can rapidly fill the tyre with (I assume)  some kind of rapidly solidifying foam that will allow me to use my bike for at least the quick scoot down to the train station (my train being on the hour and if I miss it I’d be at least an hour late for work). 

Finding that yet again product ranges have changed dramatically and this emergency repair stuff wasn’t available I bought some inner-tube Slime. This is some kind of semi-setting polymer which is supposed to be able to guarantee your inner-tubes to be puncture-less for up to 2 years assuming the punctures are less than 3 mm big. This appears to work by filling the inside of the tube with polymer that sets to a semi solid layer when the tyre is pumped up, then when a hole is formed by a puncture this polymer spreads to fill the hole and thus it is repaired – nice idea if it works…

Anyway I bought this stuff at £8-9 ish (I forget how much it actually was) and got it home to find that even though it had a valve removal tool with it and an application tube I couldn’t squirt the stuff into my inner-tube as I have a non-removable presta (aka french) type valve (not a car type valve) so it was all useless. Nb: some presta valves are removable but mine seems to be moulded )

 It didn’t say on the packet that a car type valve was required and as such I’m pretty miffed that I wasn’t able to use this somewhat expensive gunk, which I thought was a neat solution (assuming it worked) on my bike and hence my reason for writing this post – soon I’ll be off to look for the stuff I was really after.

 On a somewhat related note about valves I bought some tyre sparx from Tesco which was (next to halfords more or less) and when I got these home I found these also would not screw on as they also require schrader type valves (car tyre type valves).

I guess I should just explain what these things are – they’re super-bright flashing leds that screw onto your tyre’s dust cap and activate automatically when the wheel starts spinning – as the wheel spins faster, due to a persistence of vision effect the wheel appears to have a very bright circle of light along the rim, allowing the bike to a) stand out like a sore thumb in the dark and b) actually give the representation of a bike i.e. 2 light wheels which is very handy for other road users to make out exactly what you are(in my opinion) and therefore hopefully steer clear as necessary.

To get round this one however I was able to take my presta valve caps off, fill the tyre spark screw area with superglue and place the presta cap within it I then set these upside down in a plant pot of mud to set and 3 hours later, presto, tyre sparks for presta tyres.

I would really recommend anyone getting these as they really stick out in the dark and best of all don’t require any off/on thought or remember to take your lights/luminous jacket or whatever thought about them meaning they are always there when you need them. They also come in 3 colours blue red/orange and green/yellow. I went with the blue ones as I thought they’d be the most distinctive but I guess the choice is yours…