Monday, October 8, 2007

an armadillo experiment

[a more literal post than i usually present]

i recently had to buy some new tires and, with a strong recommendation from the men at orange20, i went with the specialized armadillo city tire [my rear is the folding version and my front is the non-folding [not purposefully]]. i've had best success with the bontrager race lite hard case, but heard good things about the armadillo and wanted to support a smaller, track-oriented shop. four days into riding the front tire [non-folding], i'm riding down w. sunset blvd. and my tire completely splits. tire is flat within twenty seconds and i find a gash through the tire in the tube about two centimeters across [bigger than i've encountered with the exception of a tube blowing up]. now i'm left with a $40 barely-used tire that's shit to me. luckily tattiya and i had gone on a ride [oh yeah, check out http://ridearc.org/] and she'd driven to meet me in silver lake, so we were near her car and drove home. fast forward three days. being a tight-ass and refusing to succumb to a small gash, i decide to try to fix this thing.

step a: buy adhesive.


step b: apply adhesive to inside of gash, both on the inner and outer parts of the tire.

step c: place a folded dollar bill across the inside tire over the gash, also using adhesive to secure the bill.


step d: wait.



i have a feeling this isn't going to work. so for now my opinion is that specialized's claim that the armadillo is "puncture-proof" is very false.

in other news,
remember the summer?

[location@@myspace.com/berdhousegallery]

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

yo yo yo have orange 20 send it back to specialized. you'll probly get some free tires out of the deal. orrrr send it to specialized yo-self.

jared said...

i think i will indeed give that a try... update: when i was about to leave my house to have the front tire looked at i realized my rear was also flat. boo. i made it to o20 just now and they were just as surprised as i was and gave me another armadillo at half price.

Anonymous said...

streets is ill.