How to Patch a Bike Tire Tube

Video Transcript

"If you ride your bike once a year or six days a week chances are you're going to get a flat tire. Hi this is Christian from Mellow Johnny's in Austin, Texas and today I'm going to show you how to patch a tire. The materials you will need will be a patch kit, a tire lever. A patch kit usually includes various sizes of patches, glue and sandpaper for roughing up the area around where you are going to install the patch. First you are going to need to remove the wheel. Once you've got the wheel off, go ahead and get your tire lever. The tire lever will go underneath the bead of the tire here and you can generally slide this around the tire until you have gotten half the tire dislodged from the rim itself. Go ahead and remove your tube. Once you've removed the tube you need to locate your hole. Usually you can mark it with a pen. In this instance the hole is on the inside right there. You want to make sure all the air is out of the tube, flatten it out so you can compress this area here. You'll need a patch kit which generally comes with various sizes of patches, sandpaper, and glue. Basically what you'll do is you'll rough up this area or sand this area down. Once you have sanded that or roughed that area up, dust that off you'll go ahead and get your patch ready to go. Go ahead and apply glue on to the tube in that area and then you'll go ahead and take your patch and install the patch on there and then apply pressure. It generally takes about three to five minutes for that glue to set. You can just set it down on a book or you can go ahead and install that tube back in there, stick that tube back in. You can start at the valve hole right here, install that tube, go back to your valve hole. This is going to be the tightest fit on the wheel entire combination and then you can generally roll these back on by hand. If you need help you can get that tire lever, hook it under that bead there, grab your floor pump, go ahead and pump it up to your tire pressure. Usually the side of the tire will have a tire pressure marking on here and then you take your wheel, go ahead and install it back onto the bicycle, reconnect your brakes and that's how you patch a bicycle tube."