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Cycling notes: new techniques to take care of a puncture – archive, 1902 | Biking

Cycling notes: new techniques to take care of a puncture – archive, 1902 | Biking

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Puncture stops countless have been devised, patented, and sold, and not a several riders have in addition, privately experimented with sugar cures, glycerine, treacle, and other glutinous or viscous resources inserted in a fluid state within the inner tubes.

Some of these dodges, and some even of the patented and relatively costly preparations, do unquestionably seal moment punctures, but not just one of them escapes the downside of currently being messy and giving a huge volume of issues when a substantial slash or a significant wound occurs. Getting all factors into thing to consider, it is preferable to have a clean and dry air tube to one that exudes sticky issue when gashed.

But a new preparing is now getting sold which differs from puncture stops and is not thoroughly classed with them. It is a protect halt, not a preparing for insertion in air tubes. Generally very careful riders endeavour to observe the instructions of compilers of handbooks of advice to cyclists and insert wedges of rubber or cotton wool soaked in remedy in the additional fatal cuts in their tubes, but these plugs are never long-lasting and usually rather unsatisfactory.

The new Westwood tyre is intended to switch these makeshifts and seemingly responses incredibly perfectly, whilst the latest experiments in a single tyre do not conclusively demonstrate its sturdiness. The preparing is a compound of rubber which when uncovered to the air hardens and seizes encompassing rubber as if vulcanised jointly. If the minimize in a include is cleaned not only of dirt but of the sulphurous movie also, exactly as the within of a tyre is cleaned ahead of one places on a patch, and if a wad of this cover halting is then pressed into the reduce, kneaded very carefully into intimate call with the cleaned edges, and remaining for a [while] the halting hardens, the hole is neatly loaded, and the evil odor of the option disappears. Customers will have to be careful to keep the stopping coated in the tin or it will harden and turn into ineffective.

Motors and cycles in Kensington High Street, London, 1903. Artist: Percy Spence.
Motors and cycles in Kensington Superior Road, London, 1903. Artist: Percy Spence. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty Photographs

Mr Dunlop talks about the pneumatic tyre

An fascinating account of an interview with Mr JB Dunlop, by Mr MMD Bodkin, KC, seems in The Bicycle owner, detailing the circumstances which prompted the inventor to devise air tyres. His eight-calendar year-previous son slash up the gravel paths on wet days with his solid-tyred toy tricycle wheels, and, as an indulgent father, he mentioned, ‘‘One working day, my boy, I will make you wheels that will be more quickly than any in town.”

Mr Dunlop had to redeem his promise. “I was accustomed,” he suggests, “to operate with rubber, but there was no tubing to be had of the form I required, so I bought a sheet of rubber and some resolution and built a tube myself. The great top secret of these perform, which puncture-repairers even still are unable to usually understand, is to get the rubber pretty clean up and to rub in the resolution tricky. I did the two, and presently I had an air-limited tube round my wheel, with a bit of the tubing of a feeding bottle sticking out for a valve. But the pneumatic tyre was not yet entire. If I experienced pumped air into it in that problem it would have blown out like a balloon till it burst. I appealed to my wife. The good thing is she had specifically what I required. She received me a strip of old costume of fine gray linen that had been fashionable in its working day. A strip of this linen I pressed over the rubber tube and tacked it neatly and tightly to the wood wheel. Then I pumped the air in with my boy’s football pump, folded and tied the close of the little bit of feeding-bottle tubing, and so the initially pneumatic tyre the entire world has at any time noticed was produced and inflated.”

The domestic image of the inventor thus urgent into services the things prepared to hand is most interesting.

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