I have a bike that states on the tire:…“Inflate to 80-85 psi” (U.S.) my wife’s bike says “40-45PSI” Both of these have lost pressure weekly and so every time we ride I check them.
I do not notice much if I ride at say 60 PSI but she is very sensitive to loss of pressure. I will usually inflate hers to 55 just to make it easier for her to pedAL. My bike has a flat about once a month, and I hate this, although I am getting much faster at changing the tube.
Repairing the tube doesn’t take that much longer and it’s a lot cheaper. I just repaired a flat on my wife’s bike last week.
Eh, last I checked, a new tube was about the same price as a patch kit. Now, granted, the patch kit can nominally make a half-dozen repairs… but then half the time the patch fails before the next problem, anyway, and that’s if the little tube of cement hasn’t dried out. Add in the extra work for patching vs. replacing, and I just buy new tubes, any more.
And I like to keep my tires at the maximum they’re rated for. Whenever I refill them, I always notice how much easier it is to ride for the next few days.
Mileages vary. I haven’t had a patch fail and the last patch I did was with a kit I bought 4 years ago. But a new tube wouldn’t break me either… depends on my mood.
Oh, they have a following even today. The Sturmey-Archer AW “Always Works” is still in use on thousands of bicycles around the world. Here are a few I’ve fixed up that are in regular use:
see this long-running thread on Bikeforums and Sheldon Brown.
I like Schwalbe tires on my bikes, though I do run Panasonic Paselas on my touring bike. The range is 35-65, but I usually pump them up to the 55-60 range. The Paselas say “keep inflated to 95 psi”, but the one time I did that I had a blowout. The calculators says 60/70, but I usually go 75/80. Seems to work fine.
You know those tiny CO₂ cylinders they sell so you can inflate your tire in seconds? For better performance, I want pure nitrogen instead, like in the Tour de France. Does anyone have any experience with that? Are the gas containers available?
You can…if you want to pay through the nose:
Stranger
Is that a thing? What would cause nitrogen to be non-food grade?
Nitrogen requires higher pressures and thus thicker/heavier cylinders. I believe the CO2 cartridges are at around 850 psi, and nitrogen needs 2,700 psi. I don’t know if that’s for an equivalent amount of tire inflation, but still.
That is exactly what I am talking about, but what explains the price, when I can get around a dozen CO2 cylinders for that amount of money, and, as far as I can tell, the big cylinders of industrial-grade nitrogen are actually cheaper than the same-size cylinders of carbon dioxide?
Whatever it is, it’s not relevant for our tyre-inflation application. Though food-grade might be an issue if you were using liquid N2 to make instant ice cream…
If you pump the same mass of nitrogen as CO2 into the same size of cylinder, you mean?
The goal is to inflate the tire to a certain target pressure, though, whether with air, CO2, or pure N2. The nitrogen will be less dense at this pressure. So actually @Stranger_On_A_Train 's 18g cylinder will inflate several bicycle tires, mitigating the price at least somewhat.
If they’ve compressed it with a compressor that contaminates the air with mineral oil and/or wear particles, that might be an issue.
Semi-related to this thread, I’ve already had three puncture flats on my bikes this year. Two of them had sealant that ended up slowing the leak, but like usual just making a huge mess of the tire and rim (all tubed tires). You know what I really hate: Flats on bike tires.
Oddly, I also had one in my car…the first in 10 years or so. I have a live tire pressure readout on the car and I was close enough to a town that I made it to a tire shop before it went flat flat.
It’s not clear cut, but lately it seems like there is less broken glass on the actual road vs on the pavement or bike lane.
I find that most of my flats while biking are from little specks of wire, not glass. I think they come from wear on steel-belted car tires.
If you cycle enough to care about flats you should consider going tubeless, especially if your rims are compatible with a tubeless setup.
Re N2.
The air your floor pump uses is already a high % N2, the CO2 cartridges are really only useful to get you home. In the longer run CO2 escapes your tire more easily, is not compatible with most sealants and is just all round faffing about compared to a decent pump.
I think that the lower boiling point of N2 makes it impractical to compress enough gas.
ISTM, that there are less pokey things in general, though this may be me mis-remembering, but as a kid it seemed like we were always getting flats in our family car. Back then, service stations had signs out advertising that they fixed flats which they don’t seem to do anymore. My favorite sign from that time:
“We flat fix 'em”
I ran my bike+trails (29”tubeless, gravel trails) through the calculator and it closely matched my preferences. I run 30/35 psi F/R on hard-packed uphill trails. I run 5 or 10 less for rocky descents. The calculator recommends 30.5/32 psi F/R.
Any containment that could cause off flavours. Containments that are actually toxic clearly are not exactly good either.
Nitrogen is often the by product of liquid oxygen manufacture. LOX is used in lots of things, and is the valuable part of the deal. But most LOX is used for industrial processes - like making steel. Industrial use really doesn’t care about containments, or how well the oxygen and nitrogen are separated. Just price.
Apparently even food grade CO2 comes in different grades, and the most pure is beer grade. Beer is very sensitive to containments that affect the flavour.
I suspect that for a lot of food purposes, oxygen is a worrisome containment. It can lead to rancid flavours. It may need to expressly limited to levels below that that other uses can tolerate. Beer is likely especially sensitive.
Nitrogen used to exclude oxygen from food processes similarly would want to be free of oxygen to maybe much lower levels than industrial nitrogen.
The nature of traffic is that when car tires hit random debris lying in the roadway the debris is bounced at random to a different spot on the road.
Which process will continue indefinitely, moving the debris to and fro. Until a piece of debris is kicked to the centerline or the margins of the road or any other spot where cars don’t much drive. Then it’ll sit there until a road crew with a street sweeper picks it up.
So yes, the debris is concentrated in the bike lanes. Because the passing cars kick it there and the passing bikes don’t kick it back nearly as effectively.