No spare ?

[Rich P. Bingham]

Fun with tires. It's a great feeling of accomplishment to repair a flat by patching a tube on the side of the road.

[Rich Eagle]

And you and I repaired many on the side of the road back in the day didn't we? How many used tires did we go through before we were able to afford new ones?
I looked at several photos like that when contriving the "Snake" cartoon. What fun!
That's another photo I want to paint when I first see it. Too many....
How about the Model A bumper? And the ragged door panel!
Thanks for taking time to post that.
Rich

[Scott_Conger]

zoom in with *CTRL +* and you'll see that the inner tube is nothing BUT patches

[Rich P. Bingham]

Thinking on tires, Rich, those refugees from Hoover wagons we rolled around on back then were a lot younger than our "new" Firestones and Riversides you've been driving since then ! I actually quite enjoyed the "drill", having a flat every few miles seemed normal enough, and those old red real rubber tubes were easy to patch. I wonder if you can even find a patch kit these days ?

I was unhappily frustrated when I got new tires - they were really hard to mount. I had those old beaters trained to leap off a rim then wiggle back on when I whistled, and Scott, most of the tubes looked like the one in the picture. Too many patches to count, but the ones that were on there were sound !

There's a feeling of true independence when you fix a tire "out yonder" with a hand pump. Like nothing can stop you !!

[Dallas Landers]

I have found several local guys that have teens or 20's cars that look much better than my T's and never drive them. Most tell me they are affraid of having a flat or breaking down along the road. I tell them to call a friend with a trailer is the worst that can happen.

I had the needle seat fall out in my roadster along the road one time. I had basic tools to repair it but had to crawl out from under the car 4 times in ten minutes to talk with strangers that stopped to help. One guy was in a modern ford, a 40 ford pickup.

Adventure is part of the fun. Flats are no fun but can be done and on the road without AAA. So far I have been lucky with flat tires only at home but Im sure that statement will bite me sooner or later.

GET EM OUT AND DRIVE EM.
Great photo of how everyone had to do it back then.

[MichaelPawelek]

Years ago I had two flats in the Chihuahuan Desert in Big Bend National Park at the same time from huge cactus needles. Had to take a pair of pliers to pull needles out of the tread while feeling the inside of the tires with my fingers. I had one spare and luckily had a tire patch kit also. 116F that day and it took 2-1/2 hours because I had to stop so many times to rest. Not one car drove by for help until I was finished and back on the road.

[Rich Eagle]

One summer I was plagued with flats. We heard a boom one day and the spare had blown out. One of the patches just let go.
Go figure.

[JohnM]

zoom in with *CTRL +* and you'll see that the inner tube is nothing BUT patches

There's no tread left on that tire either. The nylon cord isn't showing yet, or is that before synthetic cord.

[Wayne Sheldon]

Back when I was in high school, and the little bit of college I went to, clear back into grade school, I rode a bicycle A LOT! I averaged about 150 miles per week for several years. The entire Santa Clara county and San Jose had a long agricultural history, and that history brought with it a nasty little plant affectionately known as "puncture weed"! It grew flat, and spread out, in a bland dusty color that made it sometimes difficult to see quickly. If allowed to, large plants could reach eight feet across, lay flat as an unbent sheet of cardboard, and produce thousands (NOT exaggerating!) of burr seed about the size of a pea. Each with two spikes about a quarter inch long along with several smaller spikes that mostly pointed the two larger spikes up.
Most years, the puncture weed would sprout and grow in small scattered places. And it would cause enough flat bicycle tires. The stuff was so nasty, it could actually cause flats on automobile tires. When run over, the large spikes would press into the tire, the burr seed break off, and the blunted broken end would dig its way into the tire and keep digging deeper, sometimes reaching the flat tire (slow leak) level. Worn out automobile tires were more vulnerable than good new tires, but I did find several burr spikes inside nearly new tires after they managed to burrow nearly and inch!
Most years, it wasn't too bad. Maybe a dozen bicycle flats all summer and fall. But one year? Wholly mackerel! That stuff sprang up everywhere! Grew to huge sizes, overlapping plants creating areas thirty feet across! Millions of plants, places I had never seen it before! And, yes, I even had a few flats on my first model T from that nasty plant!

Thinner bicycle tires and tubes? Sometimes instant flats! I was patching tubes about every other day. The whole summer and fall. I started counting the holes every time I patched a tube. A few times I would have to patch about twenty holes from a single encounter with the puncture weed. I began cutting my patches smaller to save money. It was pointless to buy a new tube because within days it could have a dozen patches on it. I had several bicycle inner tubes with fifty to a hundred patches on them!
That was the last year I got around town by bicycle more than by car.

Ah, the things a picture of a heavily patched inner tube can make one think of.

[Steve Jelf]

I may carry a more modern tire pump, but experience has persuaded me to back it up with an original Model T pump like the guy in the picture is using. It worked a hundred years ago, and it works now.

[OilyBill]

PSHAW!!
You kids today!
I make sure to buy the kind of tires that go flat on the TOP instead of the BOTTOM!
They cost a little more, but are definitely worth it!
Also, it's a LOT less labor if you get the wife to power the tire pump. No sense in throwing out your own back, when you already have to do the work of driving the car!
Bill

[MichaelPawelek]

As the story was told by my Grandfather….My great grandfather became tired of so many flats on his Model T “pick up” from prickly pear cactus on the farm that he had the teenagers in the family remove the tubes, take out the valve cores and hand trickle dry powdery sand into the stems until the tires were filled. Then the tubes were re-installed. I have no idea if this worked or not but grandpa said it took them hours and hours filling the tubes…….

[Ned L]

zoom in with *CTRL +* and you'll see that the inner tube is nothing BUT patches

There's no tread left on that tire either. The nylon cord isn't showing yet, or is that before synthetic cord.

Before the use of Nylon cords they used cotton, which look the same when you wear down to them.
Which I believe is where the term “rot” comes from for tires. Cotton does “rot” or decay, rubber gets brittle and crazes, but doesn’t rot.

[TXGOAT2]

Mix coarse-ground black pepper and Elmer's glue and pump it into your tires.

[TXGOAT2]

Has anyone tried cottage cheese and oatmeal? Library paste and corn meal?

[Rich P. Bingham]

Ned is correct, cotton was the first cord material for pneumatic tires, followed by rayon which had a pretty lengthy "run", well past the introduction of nylon for tire cord. Rayon had an advantage over nylon in that tires would not set a "flat spot" from sitting overnight as nylon does, rolling noticeably "bumpy" until warmed up from flexion. Steel belts and radial designs eliminated that problem.

[JohnM]

Has anyone tried cottage cheese and oatmeal? Library paste and corn meal?

I have heard that in a pinch, corncobs work and are easy to come by.

[Dennis_Brown]

Looking at that tire it appears as you get further down that the tread is gone from the edges also.. over inflated and took the tread out of the middle and then under inflated and took off the edges. Gets all the mileage out of them he can that way.