Last weekend's Tandem Club ride saw me get a puncture just before lunch. I failed to find anything in the tyre, so wasn't surprised to get another a few miles on. Then at lunch, that tube was flat by the time I'd had a pint and an expensive cheese on toast. Use of the wash basin in the gents' loos located the culprit as a leaky Presta valve.
Then later in the week the replacement tube displayed the same symptoms. The tubes in question are Schwalbe and have removable cores. Wrapping the valve core thread with a twist of PTFE has fixed things, but it's a bit annoying.
And then on Friday the back tyre on the Mighty Magenta Mercian went flat. I'd noticed a tick tick tick noise in the week and ignored it. It was a piece of glass, which finally wriggled through the kevlar belt of the Specialized All Condition Armadillo. And then the poxy valve snapped off as I was trying a bit of "blow up hard and run for home", so I walked.
But the piece de resistance was when I took the tyre off this evening to fix the puncture. not only was the tread worn to almost nothing, but large sections of the rubber were unstuck from the casing of the tyre.
