Well, I've been writing this blog for just over a week now, and it's already time to issue a correction.
When I said that tyre levers were the handiest bike tool you could possibly buy, I wasn't so much putting the cart before the horse, or the egg before the chicken, or the chicken before the egg, as putting the Spicy Family Megabucket Meal before the egg and the chicken.
How so?
I completely forgot about pumps.
Even if you manage to spend your whole life cycling and never ever ever get a puncture, your tyres will still go flat at some point. It's as inevitable as the universe ending in megagalactic heat death, but slightly easier to recover from.
To my knowledge, there are two main types of pump you can buy - hand pumps and track pumps.
You'll almost certainly need a hand pump. These are the cylindrical ones that fit easily in a backpack or which can be fixed to the frame of your bike. If you're smart, you'll carry one of these with you any time you're doing a ride of any distance. (I don't, but this is another instance of "do what I say, not what I do".) If it's raining, you're still a distance from home, and you get a slow puncture, you may be able to get enough air back in your tyre to nurse your bike back home.
I got by absolutely fine for years just with one of these, but I treated myself to a little toy a year or so back ... a track pump. These are bigger jobs, with a footplate either side of a large barrel, and a handle on top which you push up and down. It's absolutely no bother to get your tyres up to exactly the right pressure in next to no time.
One word of warning when buying a pump ... make sure you get a good one. In my experience, cheap and nasty ones tend not to fit tightly onto tyre valves, and a lot of the air you're pumping in comes out again pretty rapidly.
No comments:
Post a Comment