Road/Trail-Side Flat Tire Repair For Bicycles

Flat or punctured tire while out on a bike ride (or just commuting by bicycle) doesn't have to ruin your day! Before you head out on your new (or even old) bike, you can pad your peace of mind a bit by making sure you know what to carry and how to affect this most common 'mechanical' fix while out on the road or trail.   

Replacing or patching flat tire. 

First off, what type of tires are you using? Currently there are three types of tires available... Four, if you count the solid airless tire like Tannus. As solid tires aren't going to go flat and require road/trail-side repair, I am only including clincher, tubular, and tubeless tires in this post. Here is a good video discussing their differences. 

Note that tubeless tires do occasionally go flat (perhaps it wasn't correctly seated or sealed when installed, or it got slashed rather than punctured... and the breach is too big for the sealant to handle). When tubeless tire goes poof on the road, they tend to get very messy (as in the sealant getting splashed out of the still rotating tire before you come to a stop, and there's a gooey mess everywhere) and takes longer to fix than clincher tires would. 

And, yes, fixing a proper tubeless flat on the side of the road/trail would still require that you carry a spare inner tube and/or a patch kit. Don't leave home without it!

I am also excluding the tubular tires from this post as they are generally too big a pain as to be impractical to do on the road/trail-side. Most non-racing pros aren't using them anyhow (neither do we have a support car following us around to help with the stuff). 

So, once you've figured out what type of tire you have (and whether you can fix it on the road/trail-side or not), you need to carry the correct flat repair tools and the correct size spare tubes (and a patch kit that hopefully is not older than a year, or the glue may have dried off, rendering it useless). Click here to go to the 'how to look up what size spare tube you need for your bike' post. 

- How to take the rear wheel off the bike

Here is a good video on how to take the wheel off most types of bicycles (including how to release various types of brakes to make room for the tire to come out). 

Note: You don't want to touch the disc brake rotor with your bare hand like he does in the video. That would tend to deposit skin oil to the rotor surface, causing the annoying brake squeals. If that happens, clean the rotor with rubbing alcohol (like the alcohol pads from the first aid kit) to de-squeal, and you should be good to go. 

Also, another good thing to carry in your saddle bag if your bike is equipped with the disc brakes is a pair of disc brake caliper spacer pads. Once the wheel is removed from the bike, you'd put these pads in between the brake calipers to prevent them from slamming shut should the brake lever gets accidentally pressed. Why? Because such things do happen, and when they do, there is just about no chance that you could pry them open enough by the roadside to allow the rotor to pass thru so you could put the wheel back on. 

And that... would be bad. 

How to repair flat tire while on a ride. 

Here are a couple of good videos on how to replace inner tube. 

I think she does an amazing job. Would just note that it is also good to eyeball the rim tape (what the inner tube sits on on the wheel) to make sure no spoke-end is poking around or thru the rim tape to puncture the tube.

Here is a more detailed (and long) video on how to change the inner tube. Very fine tips and details. Unlike him, though I - like the lady in the first clip - prefer to work the tire beads in starting at and then away from the valve stem rather than the other way around (finishing at the valve). 

I use Continental Gatorskin or Hardshell on my one go-anywhere-bike when riding on the roads, which is where I ride most of the time these days (I switch to cyclocross tires when hitting the trails on the same bike). And both the Gatorskin and the Hardshell are notoriously tight-fitting tires, especially when they're of the wired-bead variety rather than the more flexible folding variety. So, the last bit of beading the tire onto the rim is usually a work out. I don't ever use tire lever to push the last bit of bead in, but use the palm of my hands to massage it in. And, I don't like the idea of introducing a lot of force and/or movement to the tire/tube right near where the valve stem is. So... I start at the valve stem, and finish across the wheel from it. 

How to patch a tube. 

So, what happens if you caught a flat and don't have any spare tube available? Hopefully, you at least have a patch kit in the saddle bag that isn't so old as to have come unglued! 

But, what if you don't have even a patch kit available and not on bus line... or within area serviced by taxi or ride-sharing vehicle? 

I almost had to resort to one of these fixes once after catching 5 separate flats on a single ride out in a very remote part of the county... up in the mountains. They were all goat's head thorn punctures ganging up on my aged Gatorskins that had been subjected to too many trails riding ('cause I get trails-lust every now and then when hanging with the cars become a bit tiresome). I had gone nearly two years without any flat, and then, boom! Five flats out in the middle of nowhere, and actually depleting my overkill supply of 4 spare tubes, a patch kit (alas, was two years old and all the glue had dried up), and 5 CO2 cannisters. C'est la vie. 

Tubeless flat repair.

Just because you use a tubeless set up doesn't mean that you should go riding around without carrying a spare inner tube that fits your tires! If you manage to slash that tire enough to require putting in a boot, you're going to need to put in an inner tube to ride home on. 

Another good demo video... for good measure.

Last, but not least... flat repair for eBikes. 

Obviously, this operation would be quite more complicated if your ebike isn't equipped with a stand, as ebikes are much heavier than regular pedal bikes. Most of these ebikes fat tires come with Schrader valve, so, you can probably roll into the nearest gas station and use the car air pump there to re-inflate. The car pump will likely max out around 35-40psi, though. 

And, a more professional demo on ebike flat repair. 

Whatever bike you choose to ride, be sure to research what type of tools and spare parts you need to have on hand to be able to fix a flat on the road/trail-side! We've come a long way since the 2010s when bike parts were more uniform. Nowadays there are many different wheel sizes and tire sizes rolling on the road, and you can't count on being able to bum a tube off someone else when your tire goes poof. Prepare for the worst and enjoy your ride!