It's not cheap to buy good, quality inner
tubes these days, so it's not a bad idea to learn how to repair them yourself if
you get a puncture. Now we've already done a video on how to replace an inner tube,
so if you're unsure how to get your wheel out or how to get the inner tube out of
the tire, you might want to head there first. Now, these days you can get
self-adhesive patches which are perfect for a quick trailside fix, but if you're
at home, the safer option is still your traditional puncture repair kit. A lot of
these come with a pair of tire levers in order to get the tire off in the first
place. And all of them will come with glue, some sandpaper in order to
rough up the surface of the inner tube which aids the adhesion of the patches.
And you get various patches in different sizes. Now, you might wonder why
you need different sizes of patches. The reason that is, of course, if you've
got a small thorn going into the tire, then you just need one single, small
patch. But if you've go a snakebite puncture, which is quite common on a
mountain bike, which is where the tire compresses against the rim, you can
often get two holes away from each other. In that instance, one of the larger
patches is more adequate. Right, so the first thing you're going to have to
do is locate where the hole is on the tube. And for that, you're going
to need to inflate it using a pump. If you've got a very large hole, it's
going to be immediately obvious exactly where the air is escaping from. If it's
slightly smaller, then what you can do is run the inner tube next to your ear and
often you can hear where the air is seeping out. If you can't hear it,
if it's a particularly small hole, then the next step is to take your inner
tube to a sink, and that way you'll be able to see where the bubbles are escaping
from. Okay, so make sure that your valve is done up and gradually submerge
the inner tube in the water. So this one's pretty obvious exactly
where it is. See? A lot of air coming out. So once you've located it, be certain to
dry it off, and then you want to mark where it is so that you don't lose it
again. A lot of puncture repair kits will come with some chalk to do this, but
anything that allows you to locate it, a pen, just so that you don't lose where
that hole is. Okay, once you've marked where the hole is you can let the rest
of the air out of the inner tube by undoing the valve and pressing it in. The
next thing we want to do is take our small piece of sandpaper and just rough up the
surface all the way around our small hole. And as I said, that will help the adhesive
of the glue in the patch when we come to put that on. The next step is to
put the actual glue on, itself. Now, most of the instructions say apply
sparingly, and that is an important note to make. You don't want to put too
much on. A little goes a long way. Once you've applied the glue, you
need to wait for it to dry slightly, which takes around five minutes, perfect
for a cup of tea or coffee if you're in the U. S. The next step is to remove
the foil from the back of the patch. Most patches do look like this. Sometimes
they don't have foil on the back, and, of course, you want the center of the
patch to be over the hole as exactly as you possibly can. Make sure you get it
over the center and that there's glue underneath all of where the patch is.
Press it down firmly with your finger, and it's quite a good idea to take
something that's not sharp but fairly solid and just press it down to make sure
that there's no air trapped underneath the patch. And again, I'm going to leave that
just for a couple of minutes to set before we take this plastic off the top. You need
to be careful that you don't take the patch off with it. So start rolling it
backwards. If you do find that it starts to pick it up, just use your nail to
gradually pull it away from the plastic and make sure it stays on the tire. That's
pretty much job done. You've got some chalk that comes in your
puncture repair kit. It's good for two things. Firstly, you can use the chalk to
mark the area where the hole is in the first place. And secondly, they
normally come also with a small grater, so if you grate some of the chalk up and
just put it over the top of the patch, it will stop the glue surrounding the
patch from sticking to the inner tube when you put it back inside the tire. If
you're very confident in your abilities, then you can just put the inner tube back
inside the tire and pump it up. I'm not, so we're going to put it back
into the sink and just check there's no bubbles emerging from around thepatch.
Okay, that looks like it's perfectly fixed, so we just need to put it
back into the tire and pump it up. And again, if you don't know how to do
that, please check out our other video. By undoing the brakes, and then undoing
the quick release. If it's the front wheel, you need to unwind the quick
release slightly so that it clears the safety tabs at the bottom of the forks.