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Got some downhill tires and tubes to go on some suitable rims for our trip to the Alps this year. Just thought I'd put them together tonight. Got them on the rims easy enough, but just wouldn't seat properly. So let them down and applied a bit of WD and inflated "a bit more", still no good so repeated with "a bit more that the first bit more" and so on and so, up to 100psi (I know my own fault, but it some thing I've done dozens of times over the years). As I took the pump off and went to pick the wheel off, BANG!!! And I mean bloody big BANG!!! My ears are still ringing. I know my own fault, but my god it scared the shit out of me. Could have been worse, the next part of the process involved banging it on the floor while holding it, gulp. Lesson learned, expensive one mind. 😉
WTF radar overload 😐
WD...40?
and 100psi when "wouldn't seat properly" ? 😯
Well, it didn't look seated properly. 😳
And tubes?
Hope your ears stop ringing I know a guy who over inflated his tyre using a garage air pump and the tyre went bang and left him with tinnitus, I wonder why they have min-max pressure written on the sidewalls.
My "oooh it doesn't look seated properly" method is to keep the PSI low ( < 10psi) and manipulate the tyre manually to force the bead to seat and ensure that the line above the bead is showing all around the circumference. Once sorted then pump up normally.
Ye, downhill tubes. 58 on the wall, but I wasn't planning on riding them at 100. Once spent an hour trying to get some WTB downhill tires on a mates bike (in the Alpes again). He had hem over 120 before they went on.
Allthepies, think I'll try your method next time 😉
[quote=johnikgriff said]Allthepies, think I'll try your method next time
I've had a tyre not seated properly let go whilst inflating and can still remember it. Hence my now rigorous tyre seating procedure 🙂
I think a DH tyre letting go at 100psi+ could kill you. It could certainly blind you. I once had a slick go at about 100psi and I thought the world had ended.
I do worry about how a trackpump encourages you to lean over a tyre as you inflate it...
Quite often the tyre won't seat properly around the valve, so let a bit of air out, push the valve out of the rim a tad, and tuck the tyre beads under the tube. It's often the width of the tube where the valve is that is stopping the tyre seating properly, I find.
Looking at the state of the wire bead I recon it could have had a finger in a very bad way (if it was still attached). As I say deffinatly a lesson learned and something I won't try again. I guess the pump does road tyres as well so up to 120, recon it was just user being a twonk.
I blew up a Minion* doing that earlier this year. 80 PSI and then BOOOOOOOM! ****ing hell I won't be doing that again, I thought I'd been shot. My ears were ringing for hours, but it wore off eventually. Amazingly my 3-year-old slept right through it and I think the wife just assumed it was a normal part of bike fettling, I dunno... 😐
* One of [url= 
]these[/url], not one of [url= 
]these[/url].
Those are the best and most remembered lessons...the ones that could have ended very nastily, but by nothing more than luck ended with no serious injury.
I've done it too, at 60 psi with a track pump.
I was unsuccessfully trying to work quietly without the boss knowing, in a steel container in work.
Stans fluid everywhere and ringing ears all day, 1 buckled tyre and 1 lesson learned.