Glass in tyre

jopari

So, question for you forumites:
I punctured the other day (the day after I swapped bags without transferring spare tube!) and when looking for the offending hole I easily spotted a small shard of glass in tyre.
I then went round and checked the rest of the tyre and it was littered with small cuts which hid small shards of glass.
Questions are:
1) Is this likely to be a build-up over a long time and I was just unlucky that this one punctured my gatorskins?
2) Do you often check for this sort of "puncture waiting to happen"?

G

rolf_f

Yes, the glass shards build up over time though mainly when it is wet. I regularly check the tyres and I find it therapeutic digging the glass out - I'm disappointed if I don't find any!

Incidentally, some people will talk of replacing their tyres when the start to puncture a lot. This is what happens if you don't excavate the glass. The glass gets constantly pushed into the kevlar bead until eventually it goes through and punctures the tyre.

If you clean the tyres out, this doesn't happen and your tyres last much longer - plus you don't go through the 'lots of punctures' stage (though, as you found, you still can have the odd puncture if you are unlucky).

Underscore

Yes, I check reasonably frequently but Gatorskins do seem particularly prone to this type of puncture: both the punctures that I've had with mine were due to flint shards having never had a problem with the Spesh Armadillos that I previously ran. I'm about to replace one of my Gators so will be going with a Durano to see if they are more resistant to this failure mode...

_

rolf_f

Underscore wrote:

Yes, I check reasonably frequently but Gatorskins do seem particularly prone to this type of puncture: both the punctures that I've had with mine were due to flint shards having never had a problem with the Spesh Armadillos that I previously ran. I'm about to replace one of my Gators so will be going with a Durano to see if they are more resistant to this failure mode...

_

No probs here with Durano and Durano S fwiw.

chainoff

Just had 4 puntures in a row untill I found the glass burried in the Gatorskin , you could't feel the glass if you ran your fingrs inside the tyre or on top of the tread . It took about 2 miles for the re-acuring punture occur. What a pain to find . Glass extraction will be on my list to do from now on.

corshamjim

No problems here with Marathon Plus, Durano Plus or Panaracer RiBMo either, but found hawthorn had punctured Marathon Winter tyre this year and same thing happened to a tyre that came as stock on my Trek Pilot (Bontrager All Weather if I recall).

Initialised

Adds to list of weekly rituals.

Smirf

Snap.... I'd never bothered checking my Gators as I hadn't had a puncture, but for some reason ended up looking at them and found a multitude of glass shards in there.

Question... When you take them out, do you use anything to fill the gap such as a small dab of superglue?

Underscore

FWIW, I've never filled the holes left on mine and I don't seem to have suffered as a result - as far as I can tell...

rolf_f

Underscore wrote:

FWIW, I've never filled the holes left on mine and I don't seem to have suffered as a result - as far as I can tell...

+1. I did fill one cut last year - that was about 5mm long and quite quite wide but I only tried to glue it once and the glue made little difference (aside from that there was now something hard and sharp in the split that I had put in the tyre (ie the glue)!! I finally binned the tyre a couple of weeks ago - by then the split was 2mm wide and I could see the inner tube starting to bulge through the casing! I'd probably done a good 3000 miles on the tyre since gluing.