Understanding the Different Types of Flat Tires

Video Transcript

Hi! I'm John Brown and I'm from High Road Cycles in Wayne, Pennsylvania. I am going to show you the different types of flat tires. It sounds redundant but there are many many different types of flat tires. There's not just one cause. The one most people are familiar with is a piece of glass, a nail, a thorn, something like that going through your tire and giving you a flat tire putting a hole in the inner tube. That is fairly common but what is actually more common is the next type of flat which is a pinch flat. How a pinch flat works is if your tire something like this doesn't have enough air in it, what will happen is you will come across an object whether it be a pot hole or curb or something along those lines and you will hit the edge of the curb or pothole, it will deform the tire. That hard object the curb or pothole will work in union with the rim and work like scissors and actually pinch and cut 2 holes in the inner tube and that is actually going to look something like this here. Sometimes it is referred to as a snake bite because it has 2 separate holes. The next type of flat is typically caused by someone using hand pump or being fairly aggressive with an inner tube while inflating it and that is simply tearing the valve right off the inner tube. Not uncommon, happens fairly frequently and in this case, we are going to be replacing the inner tube. The final type of flat tire is going to be a blow out of some sort. Typically this happens when you cut the sidewall of the tire on a large piece of glass or an object or it simply breaks down from years of dry rot. What will happen is you will get a very large hole in the side of the tire. When that happens even if the inner tube is not punctured, all that pressure that is being housed within the tire finds its way out right here and bursts through the inner tube. It will either give it a star like pattern or just a very very large slash into the inner tube. Those are the most common types of flat tires. There's a lot of different ways you can work around fixing them.

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