Flat tires and wheel service

The tube itself is the easy part. What takes the time is the diagnosis: I inflate the old tube, find the hole, and use its position to work out where in the tire the object went in. A puncture on the outside of the tread is debris. Two holes on the inner face is a pinch flat, which means pressure. A hole on the rim side of the tube usually means the rim tape has failed and a spoke end is chewing through — and that will keep happening until the tape gets replaced.

Flat repair is $25 with the tube extra. If the tire is worn through or cut, tire and tube replacement is $30 per wheel. Flats are usually same-day.

The pressure conversation is worth having. Most flats I see are underinflation, and most people run road tires much softer than the sidewall calls for because a soft tire feels comfortable. A floor pump with a gauge and thirty seconds a week prevents more flats than any tire I could sell you.

Tubeless setups run the tire sealed directly against the rim with liquid sealant inside instead of a tube. When a thorn goes in, the sealant plugs the hole while you're still riding and you often never know it happened. For mountain bikes on Front Range trails — which is to say, in goathead country, on rocky ground, at pressures low enough to grip — it's a genuine improvement rather than an upgrade for its own sake. It isn't a mountain-bike-only service, though. Road, gravel, and commuter wheels get set up the same way, at the same price per tire.

Tubeless setup is $25 per tire plus supplies and materials, whatever kind of bike it's on. Your wheel and tire both have to be tubeless-compatible, and I'll check that before you commit to anything.

The maintenance nobody mentions: sealant dries out, and it dries out faster in dry air than the bottle's estimate assumes. Colorado is dry air. Plan on refreshing it a couple of times a season rather than once a year, and if a tubeless tire has started going soft overnight, dried sealant is the first thing to check.

A wheel is a tensioned structure. The rim is held in a circle by the pull of every spoke against every other one, and when one spoke loses tension the rim pulls toward the opposite side. That's what a wobble is — not a bent rim, usually, just an unbalanced pull. Truing means adjusting spoke tension a quarter turn at a time until the rim runs straight again in the stand.

Lateral truing — side to side, the kind you notice as brake rub — is $30 per wheel. A wheel that has been ridden out of true for a long time takes longer to bring back, because the spokes have taken a set, but the price is the price.

A broken spoke is a different job. The replacement has to match the length, the wheel has to come back to even tension, and if a spoke broke at the elbow on an older wheel, others usually follow within a few months. That work isn't on the flat-rate menu — get in touch, tell me what the wheel is, and I'll tell you what it needs and what it costs before you commit.

Not every wheel should be repaired, and it costs you money when someone pretends otherwise. A wheel is finished when:

• The rim braking surface has worn concave, which you can feel with a fingernail. It will eventually split under pressure and that's a serious failure.
• There's a flat spot or a crease in the rim from an impact. It might true acceptably, but the metal is fatigued at that point.
• Spokes are breaking one after another. The wheel has reached the end of its fatigue life and each replacement buys weeks.
• The cost of the repair approaches the cost of a comparable wheel — which happens quickly on entry-level machine-built wheels.

I'll tell you plainly which of these applies. On a bike where the wheel is worth more than the frame, saying so is the useful answer.

Spoke replacement, wheel building, and anything involving a damaged rim get looked at and quoted first. Estimates are free.

If the wheel is rubbing because of the brake rather than the wheel, that's on brake and drivetrain repair. If the bike needs more than one thing at once, a tune tier is usually cheaper than stacking individual jobs — see bike tune-ups.