Punctures suck. Towards the end of last year I had a super slow puncture on my Gary Fisher full squish MTB, that was annoying, and the fact it never seemed to seal with tube glue was even more annoying.

A few days before Christmas I went to practice riding that bike at the downhill tracks near me, in preparation for the visit to my Uncle and rocking it down Llandegla Forest. The pucture there seemed to have sealed. I think I was out about 4 hours, with a ride to the tracks, and then quite a bit of time spent at the Rothley jumps on the way back (since people were there).

This is the first time riding a full squish that's my own at degla, I first rode it on my uncles Cannondale, then on my dirt jump bike (where the brakes went half way down), then a few more times on my jump bike, and once more last summer on his other Cannondale. A 27.5 fully, my 26" hard tail, and the trigger I locked the rear suspension because I couldn't figure it out. Riding the Gary Fisher was the best bike possible, fitting it badly into the car was a great choice! A bike I knew, and could whip around, with the advantages of proper grippy tyres, and full squish!

On the first decent my rear tyre started to go a little squishy, it wasn't terrible, and had taken a while to go down, so I just pumped it up a bit and we headed on. We then got to the fork in the road, a technical stairs rocks, and jumps section, or a flowey trail. I took the tech, my Uncle went down the flow. Half way down that, during the jumps and turns, I realised my rear tyre was going flat again... Terrible! Clearly it wasn't sealing itself.

Riding on to the join I decided to swap it while waiting for Uncle (his route was longer, as it exited further down the climb back to this connection). I quickly managed to get the tube out, swap it for one in my bag, and get under way. I checked carefullyish for thorns still in the tyre (my first thought of why it was going flat still was that there was something in there opening the gap again and again) and couldn't find anything.

The puncture was fixed it seemed and all fine. I rode on towards the finish, but on the 2nd to last descent it was going flat again. A quick pump up, and it did the final track beautifully (that final stretch is hell on a hard tail. It's got a strava segment marker, and is part of every trail, so many people rip it up going too hard to the first jump that there's braking bumps on the takeoff and you have to prejump scrub for speed. So much better on the fully)

The next day the tyre was fully flat...

Fast forward a week and it's the 31st, and I decide to end the year riding my XC MTB, the GT. I head out, with one tube still in my pack (all my MTBs share the same toolkit). I'm going for an hour, it'll be fine! I get about half way round, having done 2/3 of the off road sectors and my rear is going flat... Oh well bugger. I pull over, pump it up, hope it's a slow flat that I can pump up here, do the final offroad, then pump up once or twice on the road home. A minute later and it's clear it's gone too far, so I pull over to replace it.

There's a huge goats head in the tyre, so clearly I'd hit something I shouldn't have! I pulled that out, checked for other things, and fixed the problem nice and quick (helped by how easy it is to remove 90s tyres from 90s rims!) Back on the bike, and off down the final off road sector to home.

Not 100m later, after being let through a gate by a kind walker, I heard a terrible psssh noise... I hoped to fuck it was just the guys coat as he closed the gate, but no, front flat. A weird sense of relief came over me as I realised I hadn't fucked up and failed to fix my puncture! But I did have no spare tube to fix the flat... And now I had to walk 6km home.

An hour later, made easier by listening to The Cyclocross Social Podcast (almost useful really, as I needed to catch up over the Kirstperiod) I made it home. Just as I came through the final little gravel footpath behind my house I felt the rear going flat, and sure as shit after I'd hosed down the bike it was flat too.

So 3 punctures in 1 ride, and 2 the ride before... Not a good time. I gave up, and left those bikes unfixed, a pile of tubes in the corner, and 3 tubes in bikes flat. My motivation was completely gone through January and Feb (see this post for vague info on that)

At the tail end of Feb I was going to see a bike film A Sunday in Hell, at the cinemas (blog post link) and the day before I decided that rainy day to fix all the tubes. My road bike was now also dead, from a freehub failure (more about that later, about 2 hours before writing this post I dropped the wheel off at the shop to be fixed, so yeah, I'll forget to update this post so go find it yourself)

I brought the tubes into the house, whipped wheels off the bikes, and started fixing.
First tube up, big hole, easy to find, but annoyingly on an edge so it was a touch hard to glue.
Second tube was harder to find, so I had to get the bucket of water out. I even took care to put some old tea towels down! I'm learning! Once I found it, it was fine.
The third tube was harder, it was the one with sealant in it. I had to end up leaving it, as I couldn't find any hole in it at all. I'd eventually find it the next day after the sealant left a nice big pink dot on the side (I left it pumped up hanging over the handlebars) and I've now patched it up.
The fourth was a really tough one. One bubble a second in the water. This was the rear wheel puncture walking home from the 3 on the GT. I'm not actually sure if this one is fixed, since it was so small I had to guess where to put the patch after gluing it! I think the glue sealed it first anyway.
The final one was an easy one, I think it was the goats thorn. Patched and fixed.

I left these on the sofa overnight because I didn't want to find they didn't dry properly as I've had issues with before. Many times I've fixed tubes, put them back in, and had them leak or go bang... I'm slowly learning to fix punctures well. I'm used to by the side of the road patching with glueless and hoping it works. I still hate fixing road tubes, anything smaller than a 30-40mm wide tube size is horrible (and it's hard to find that small size of patches, mine are 20mm)

None of the bikes still have their tyres back on at this point, but at the very least I can throw a tube or two into the saddle bag and ride the one bike that didn't get punctures (this time) my dirt jump bike. When the weather clears, hopefully for my Birthday this weekend, I'll be getting back out on that to play in the dirt again.

I didn't have time to write a short post, so I wrote a long one instead.