Repairing by Yourself a Punctured or Damaged Tire on the Road

In this post, we want to share with you our know-how to repair a punctured or ripped tire by yourself, even on the road or on the trail.

How to take your tire out of the rim

Normally, the first difficulty is taking our tire out of the rim. There is a special tool conceived for this purpose, see pictures below. Since we seldom have that tool with us, because it’s quite heavy, there are other ways. For instance, we can lay our wheel on the edge of any step, be it stairs or a sidewalk, letting only the tire touch the edge, not the rim. Then, preferably with a bike shoe having a stiff sole, we firmly press the tire with our foot, pulling it up simultaneously with our hands. It will come out quite easily, depending on our strength. In case you’re a senior and you don’t feel like doing that, just explain this useful technique to any biker passing by and let him help you.

How to mount your tire on the rim

Rim slope

Oftentimes, we find difficult to lodge the tire onto the rim. It even seems too large for it, especially if it’s tubeless. We could use the tire lever, but it’s dangerous, because we often risk pinching our tube between the tire and the rim and pierce it. A good trick is to spread some regular soap with a bit of water on the inside and outside wall of the tire. This will soften it, making it easier to slip it inside the rim. Another solution is taking advantage of the slope inside the rim: if we succeed in pushing the edge of our tire into the slope, little by little we succeed in fitting the whole tire onto the wheel, with our hands.

Repairing our tires

To start, we can put one or more layers of American adhesive band on the hole or the ripped part of the tire. If the whole is to long or wide, it’s better to sow ourtire. In order to do that successfully, we need a strong needle, like the ones used by shoemakers, and an equally strong thread, once again shoemakers can help. Leave a gap of 3 to 5 mm between stitches. Knots should be left outside, otherwise they can rub the tube and pierce it sooner or later. We should apply some glue on the knots, to be sure that they’ll stay in place. Finally, we take a  patch made cutting a piece off an old tire, conveniently adjusting it to abundantly cover the hole in our tire. We apply some glue on it and will stick it on to the stitches, so that they want to rub our tube and they will be sealed if it’s a tubeless. Of course, we wait a good 15 minutes to let the glue dry and stick firmly. It’s done, good job!

You may want to read too: how to repair our tubes on the road.

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