Day #3: Gluing tubs
So the snazzy fix on my tire didn’t hold. I think the original tube was latex and the spliced in part was butyl, and you can’t really splice them together. I’ll call the whole experience a win, though, as I learned that tearing into a tub is really not that bad.
So yesterday afternoon I headed out to Oak Park to pick up a set of Vittoria Corsa CRs, which are the top of Vittoria’s non-pro line. Once home, I put them on the wheels to stretch overnight (keeping the old front tire for a spare). They slipped on the wheels much easier than all the complaining on forums led me to believe they would.
This morning I got up early to glue them on in anticipation of ~130 miles of riding this weekend. Given that there are seemingly as many glue methodologies as there are tub riders, I decided to follow the directions in the tire packaging: glue on rim and tire, wait ten minutes, another layer of glue on the rim and then mount. I prepped the floor with a split garbage bag, and gathered a bunch of sandwich bags to use as glue spreaders. The front tire was largely a success. That is, I got the glue where it needed to go, and the tire mounted without vast quanities of glue in places it didn’t belong. I don’t know if it was all the glue on the bag or what, but the rear was much more of a pain, and I managed to smear up the sidewalls a whole lot. It mounted crooked and I had to do lots of massaging to get it set right.
So how much of a pain is gluing? It’s a pain alright. It’s messy in that uncontrollable gluey way. As soon as the glue flashes it becomes like fly paper, and anything (your spreader, your gloves, toes etc) that gets near it is instantly adhered. The smell wasn’t as bad as advertised, but this would have been massively easier if I wasn’t worried about getting glue on the floor etc. In terms of difficulty, it wasn’t bad, but it was surely annoying and not the sort of thing I’d want to do very often. Most annoying is that my awesome new Vittorias look like they were glued on by a distracted first grader with excess rubber cement to burn — totally bringing “I have an italian race bike and must have a mechanic since I run tubs” down to the level of “look I made my own operating system!” I’m gonna be lookin for a mud puddle for sure.