Don't do what I did. Dumb frugality expensive and dangerous
Last couple of winters, I put on a pair of mostly worn-out tires on my bike to ride on the trainer. Seemed sensible enough. Why wear out the new ones. Save a few bucks, right?
The other day, I had a few extra minutes (and the weather was terrible), so I swapped tires again, taking off my relatively new ones and putting on the old crappy ones I had replaced last time.
Well, of course the weather was better today (at least at 7:00 am during my kid's cross country run) so I went outside for a ride. Long story short, I had a catastrophic instantaneous blow out of the rear tire while riding pretty darn hard/fast on my way home, and I went down. Hard. Changing out the tube, it was obvious that it blew at a bad spot on the old tire. To add insult to injury, it started to pour as I was changing the tire before getting back to pick up my kid...
The good news is that there was very little damage to the bike - just a couple scrapes to bottle cages and the wheels were thrown out of true. Also, the damage to me was pretty minimal. Bruised butt and ego, and I have had a headache all day. Man, you should see what happened to my helmet. Landed on the back of it and it's split clean through in a couple places, just held together by the internal skeleton.
LBS was kind enough to true my wheels in a few minutes while I made a purchase of a new helmet.... the kept the old one for the "why you should wear a helmet" demo pile.
So, for my trying to save a few bucks of tire wear and getting a little lazy for this morning, I had to buy a new helmet and tube and probably got a little concussion.
Dumb.
Comments
I am glad you are okay, that is good advice learned the hard way for you. Wish someone would steal my helmet maybye I could talk to the wife about getting a aero helmet?
@Zach - You probably just want to get the aero helmet as a second one. You'll ride it somethimes in training, but probably not every day. Relative to other things, it is cheap "free speed" - pretty similar to race wheels in impact! Very round numbers - about 1 minute over the course of a 40K. It makes a bigger percentage difference for faster riders, but a bigger absolute difference for slower ones.
As for the tire itself, supposedly it has better thermal properties or some jazz so perhaps I get a more even Crr on the CT all winter, but I haven't really been able to tell much of a difference.
William - Glad to hear that you are okay. Thanks for passing along the lesson for the rest of us. I've been guilty of riding too long on a set of tires before, hearing this will may me rethink that strategy!
speedy recovery!
+1 on the Continental Home Trainer tire for trainer riding... although I HAVE blown one of those out before on the CT. Glad you're okay. Bruised egos heal faster than bruised bones.
+2 on those tough as nails conti tires.
"Bruised egos heal faster than bruised bones." -- Cheers to that! We need a quote folder in the wiki.
Glad the helmet did it's job. Much rather have the helmet explode and give you a longer 'ride down' time than have a pretty helmet and brain that turned to jelly.
I've been told that 2 hrs on a helmet and it's time to go shopping for a new one. Drop it once and it's time to go shopping again. Any truth to these legends?
V
@Vince Do you mean 2 years (not 2 hours?)
Here's what I "know" about helmets:
Helmets are designed to disperse the blow, which means they are designed to crack, crumple, etc. So if a helmet takes a blow, it is more than likely "broken" and won't function well again, i.e., they are "single use" helmets. As a result, if you have any sort of crash where you hit, you can pretty much assume you need a new helmet. As far as dropping it from a few feet? I wouldn't think that woulld be a big problem. What you want to do is stretch/strain it from several angles and make sure there are no cracks in it that weren't evident when you just looked at it. I've seen cracks in other people's helmets show up from very modest falls when you do this "stretching" bit.
The "age" of the helmet comes about from the fact that the polystyrene (I think it's polystyrene) oxidizes over time. Almost all organic material does. (Think about newspaper yellowing, for example.) As the organic polymer in the foam oxidizes, its properties degrade, mainly getting more brittle and easy to collapse, which are both bad for the head-protection business. So yes, there is truth to this idea. The thing I don't know is how long it takes before that becomes significant. The manufacturer's recommendation is probably pretty conservative, and I'd see no reason to go any more frequently than they say.
Would like to see a pic of the tire. Was the tire worn all the way through?
Beth, they can be called EN'isms.
Glad you were ok. Sounds brutal.
This isn't a terrific picture, but it shows why I had replaced the tire. The general tread still was ok, but there were a few pretty bad rock gouges. This is the worst one. You can see the interior fabric through it, and it was right here that the tube blew. I am generally very happy with these tires (Michelin Pro Race 3) as far as wear, ride, and grippiness, but I have had this one and another that had a sidewall slice (which happened during the Wisconsin tri-rally...grrr).
Sucks you went down and glad it sounds like no serious damage. I wanted to see the tire as that is a really weird thing to have happen. IME usually sudden blowout happens as a result of a crash rather than because of it. When you make a hole in the tube thought the tire it usually does not "pop" or blowout. You sure that it was tire first then crash? Did you hit something? Rough road? What exactly was going on at the time?
Just trying to do some accident reconstruction to prevent you and/or all the rest of us from doing the same thing in the future. Especially considering that I have often ridden outside on my "trainer tire" when I am to lazy to swap what is on the PT wheel.
I totally understand your skepticism. I am basically blaming the divot in that tire by process of elimination and the coincidence of the hole in the tube with the location of that divot on the tire. I checked it as I removed the tube.
As to what was happening...
I was riding along at somewhere in the neighborhood of my FTP on a flat straight section of road. There are some rocks along it, but not in the section I was riding, and I went back to double check that I had not hit a pothole or big crack that I wasn't paying attention to. The sound was a very strange one for me in that it was just a single "crack" sound like a firecracker or whatever. There was no 2-second "pssst" sound. I have fallen a few times for various reasons, and "not fallen" many more (meaning had something go wrong but saved it), and I am quite sure the problem was on the rear, i.e., I didn't crash as a result of hitting something with my front. The feeling also reminded me of when you fishtail on a car...I am pretty sure I "fishtailed" on the bike.
I hit the back of my head (and have quite a pretty bruise right below my tramp stamp) because I sat up and grabbed the exterior handle bars and I guess the momentum of that and being unable to quite get control again carried me backwards. I didn't brake because I knew the bike was not straight and htat to brake would send me over the top going forward.
It remains possible that I hit a particularly nasty rock with my back wheel, but if I did, it did not leave a particularly notable mark on the tire. I am quite sure the divot in the rubber that I illustrated in the photo was there beforehand, because it was mainly that divot that led me to replace the tire prematurely.
I am not sure why my wheels both went out of true, but I imagine it had to do with the forces in the crash as I was going down. Fortunately, that was taken care of at the LBS while I bought a new helmet. (I pay too much for helmets, and they true my wheel for free... :-) )
Really weird. Glad that your noggin came through unscathed. Pretty easy to knock wheels out of true when you put the shiny side on the road.
Not another crash story! So sorry William. Sounds like you'll be hurting for a bit. Join the club, and it's not a fun one. Hoping you heal up quick!
I'm basically fine. I've got some very sore muscles in my neck and torso (lifting my head while lying on my back hurts), but I'm basically fine as far as generic life and training. I actually got back in the saddle (partly for confidence reasons) and had a very good ride the day after the fall.
The big message from my fall - at least for me - is to remember not to cut corners on the safety issues....for me, the tire. But the truth be told, the helmet probably saved my life, or at least life as I know it now. Blunt force trauma (like from a road!) to the base/back of your skull is not a good thing!