PANCHO HERRERA: My name is Pancho Herrera and today I'd like to show you how to repair a punctured inner tube. First step is to find the puncture. You've removed the tube that you know isn't holding air from the tire and you're going to put a little bit of air in it, see if you can find that hole. Remember that there are some holes that are not patchable. So you want to identify the size and the type of damage on that inner tube. If it's too great of holes, it's probably best just replace it with the new one. Pull the air in here. See we can listen for that hiss of escaping air. Put a little marker pen circle around it, so we know where we're working here. Now, we take the air back out of the tube and take note of that spot. There are two formats of patch kit on the market. There are the glueless adhesive patches, those work great. And then there's the traditional vulcanizing patch kit. We'll try that one today. Both of them use the same initial preparation, so the same steps apply for both types. We're going to start by preparing our work surface, our repair surface. I'm going to do that by scuffing the tube, scuffing the rubber, essentially cleaning it and preparing it for the adhesive. Both types of patch kits require scuffing of the repair surface. There's our hole, we want to scuff an area with the provided sand paper. Some of them have a metal scrapper. They both work the same. Now, in the case of an adhesive patch or an instant patch, you simply stick it on there and rub it down and away you go. For the vulcanizing patch, you want to lay down a small film of glue like this. You want to lay down a little area of glue, a little bit bigger than the patch itself. Now, the most important step that everybody seems to forget, let that stuff dry. You want to let the liquid part of the adhesive evaporate completely, that's a real important step. While that's happening, I'll prepare my patch. These vulcanizing patches have a sticky side and a hard side. We want to make sure we're preparing the sticky side. In this case, that's the orange side, leaving the dark rubber side prepared. My liquid glue has now evaporated, leaves kind of a mat surface and we're ready to apply the patch. Best thing to do, stick that patch right over the hole and begin to rub that in with your thumb. Last step with these vulcanizing patches, peel the rubber backing off, then you are ready to ride.
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