For those of you who've actually had a puncture and flat rear tire on a Spyder, how did you locate the hole and fix it, or did you call AAA? Did the tire come off the rim?
I've probably ridden somewhat more 'hazardous miles' &/or 'puncture prone miles' than most Spyder ryders, some of them deliberately, some of them just cos that's where I was heading; and over the last 15 odd years and lotsa miles of Spyder ryding, I've had my share and then some punctures in the rear tire of various Spyders, but IIRC, none of them have been all that hard to find.
When it's been punctures in the rear OEM Kendas &/or one of their clones (somewhat numerous), their punctures have tended to be more sudden & unexpected occurrences with little if any warning, often explosively so; and generally, the gaping hole &/or dirty great rip in the sidewall has been bloody obvious and not the least bit hard to find; and the OEM Kendas/clones are the only tires where I've ever seen them either fail completely and either come entirely off the rim (once only, but btw, do you realise how bloody expensive a new rear Spyder rim is?
) or actually break the bead during the puncture &/or during the immediate 'post tire failure' slow down afterwards, events which sometimes caused hazardous situations &/or control issues. And they are also the only tires I've had failures with on Spyders that've resulted in 'failure to proceed' situations that've required wheel & tire removal & replacement before carrying on, often also requiring a flat-bed ride.
When it comes to reasonable quality a/mkt tires run at the appropriate (lower) pressures for the stronger tires (noting that I haven't really done anything much more than about 1000 miles on cheap/crap a/mkt tires), the punctures in a/mkt tires that I've had have been significantly fewer, (not even up to counting them on all the fingers of one hand yet); generally occurring thru picking up sharp objects on the road; always revealing themselves with a slow and gradual loss of pressure first and with a noticeable degradation in Spyder's handling and performance; but always allowing plenty of time to pull over safely and search for the offending object/puncture before all the air pressure has bled out, such that gently rolling the Spyder forwards while watching the rear tire for signs of a screw etc &/or escaping air has rapidly revealed the leak and allowed a quick fix from outside the tire before the tire went completely flat, and then I've been able to continue on (carefully!
). Because I'm a tire nerd, I have however, always removed the wheel & tire at the first reasonable opportunity afterwards and either properly repaired those punctures from inside, or on the one occasion the screw causing the puncture was in a compromising position and had damaged a steel belt, I replaced the tire. That said, I have travelled over 5,000 miles on an external 'dog turd' type rear tire repair that I'd rather I hadn't needed to, simply because I was so far away from home when the puncture occurred, travelling mainly in the sticks from there on, and I was unable to get access to a place where I could do the job and have a suitably sized tire on hand if needed until after I did get home...
As far as I'm concerned, there's a whole lot of very sound reasons meaning that I myself, prefer to, and often suggest to others,
not to ride on OEM Kenda/their clones tires for any longer than is absobloodylutely and truly necessary - and in my opinion, ideally, that should be no further than directly from the dealers/place of purchase to the nearest tire replacement workshop/opportunity! I have actually picked up a low milage Spyder that was still wearing its over-age and 4000-ish miles (rear worn out!) OEM tires on a flat-bed, had it delivered about 2 miles away to a workshop, where I borrowed their facilities to remove all three of the OEM tires & replaced them with 'real' tires before riding 3000 miles home.
