Getting a puncture whilst you're out riding is an inconvenience.
However, it will happen to all of us that ride regularly at some point.
You can reduce your chances of getting one by making sure that you replace tires when
they start to wear out. But even then it only takes a sharp piece of glass or thorn
and you'll have a flat tire. We always recommend at a minimum that you take out a
multitool, along with a pump a couple of spare inner tubes and a couple of tire
levers. And it's those last three which we'll need today to fix this flat tire.
Easiest way to get the back wheel out is to firstly put your chain down to one of
the smallest sprockets here on the back. So just click believer down,
give it a few turns until it's on to that smallest sprocket, put the wheel on the
floor. Don't be tempted to turn your bike upside down and rest it on the levers
because you can potentially scratch them. Just gently put it down on the non-drive
side, preferably on a bit of grass. It's time to remove one side of the tire.
You don't need to take it off completely. Firstly, make sure that any air is
completely out . Take one of your tire levers, get in underneath the beading on
one side of the tire. Put your other one a few inches further around,
basically where you can get some grip underneath the bead. Some kinds of tires,
you can just start to slip your tire lever around like this and it will fairly easily
come off all the way around. So one side of the tire bead is completely off.
Pull it all the way out until you get up here to the valve, lift the tire over to
reveal the inner tube and you'll just be able to pull that inner tube out.
Put it to one side on your bike and you'll know that that's the punctured one.
Right before we go and put the brand-new inner tube in, we want to check what has
caused this puncture in the first place. If it's been a pinch puncture and you just
hit a pothole very hard, that will be very, very obvious. However,
it's gone down slowly and didn't really notice until it began to go soft.
You'll want to go around the inside of the tire carefully with your hands.
I say carefully because of course whatever's penetrated through your tire
into the tube is likely to be very sharp, so it could penetrate through your skin as
well. So in this case, the offending article is just a sharp thorn which I've
just been able to get out using my thumbnail.
So once you're satisfied that you've got the offending item out of the tire,
it's time to put the new inner tube in. And that is much more easily done if the
tube has got some shape to and it's not just flat like this.
So you've got a couple of options, you can simply undo the valve again here and blow
it up yourself.
Or if you don't want to do that, you can simply attach a pump and
do the same thing with that. It doesn't need to be too pumped up,
just to give it a bit of roundness so it fits inside the tire a bit easier.
So once you've got the shape in the tube, do the valve back up here.
Find the valve hole on the wheel, which in this case is here. And then simply drop
the valve through it after you've bent the tire backwards. Then you want to get the
bead over the inner tube there at the valve to start with, and you can start to
tuck the inner tube in all the way around. So once the tube's bedded in,
it's time to start putting the bead back over onto the rim. In some instances,
I think possibly like on this one you can do the whole thing by hand.
However, if it's not that easy, it's a bit too tight, you can simply put the tire
levers up and use them to bend the bead of the tire back on. But just be careful
again that you don't pinch the inner tube with your tire lever .
Once you've got it seated back on the rim like this, we want to go around it step by
step, pulling it over on the side that you put it back on. Just to make sure that you
can't see the inner tube protruding underneath the rim of the tire.
Because if you do and you start pumping it back up to a higher pressure it can
actually explode again. So I've just got a bit here where you can see the inner tube
underneath the tire. So before we start to pump it up, we want to make sure that that
inner tube is firmly inside the tire. There's no specific technique to this .
It's just simply a case of I try to roll it around until you can't see the inner
tube anymore on both sides. Once you're happy with that we can begin pumping.
Right, that's pretty hard and I reckon that must be somewhere up towards a 100
PSI and there's one last check that it's seated properly. Give the wheel a quick
spin and make sure that it's fairly smooth all the way around.
If you get any big bubbles up and down the tire, it generally means that you've got
your tube snagged underneath. Okay, ready to put that in. Just do the valve up here
again and we're ready to put the wheel back into the bike.
So almost in the same way that you've put it in, push the rear mech down,
the cage part at the back to make sure that's the case. And as we've already put
it into the smallest cog, that's where you want to rest the top jockey wheel.
It should just slip in. Okay, before you set off just give a quick bit of peddling,
making sure that the chain's still seated properly on both the chain ring and the
cogs at the back. You might even want to put it up a few cogs if you're starting
back on a climb like I am before we get going. Then it's just a case of clearing
your rubbish and your tools up.
One last thing, though, before you get on your way, if you have loosened your cante
lever brake off to get your wheel out, make sure that you do it back up.