Endless Punctures In China

We left home with Schwalbe tires Marathon Plus tyres and we still have 1 original tyre each! They’re bloody brilliant.

Outside of China we had 1 puncture between us – Stew’s rear tyre.

The lifecycle of our tyre is, 10,000kms and we’ve already exceeded that by at least 2,000kms. We always planned to swap them in Almaty, Kazakhstan, but since we couldn’t find the exact same tyre we decided to press on with what we already had.

In the end we did buy 2 Schwalbe marathon tyres and replaced 1 tyre each as Stew felt that the back tyres had deteriorated a little too much for his liking, bearing in mind Stew is super-careful.

I haven’t had a single puncture in 12,000+kms , Stew on the other hand has had 8 in China!! He had a run of getting at least 1 a day for a few days and it’s very frustrating. That being said it’s pretty common to get punctures in China due to the amount of trucks on the road, we are also putting our tyres through their paces now. The one tyre thats suffering has been on the bike since day 1 and we think Stew’s tyres endure a little more than mine as his bike is so heavy.

Aside from the punctures, and Stew’s saddle that broke during a fall our bikes are doing a tremendous job! We’ve done little work to them, aside from general maintenance.

Our chains have both been on the bike for 12,000kms and according to the manufacturer it should’ve been changed after 4,000km. We never intended to push our kit this hard, but when we couldn’t find exact replacements we just decided to carry on. It’s quite interesting, I think, to see how far it can go.

I’m always a little dubious about life cycles, use by dates and recommended uses – for example who shampoos their hair twice every time? A manufacturer always wants to manage expectations and in order to do that they need to play it safe. They’re right to, but testing the kit is a fun experiment!

How far do you push your kit and how have you got around problems like mechanical failure? Doesn’t have to be bicycle related actually, tell me about any “bodge” jobs/inventive repairs.

I’ll write about a wardrobe and car “repair” in the comments – contains gaffa tape and hair bands! @ Linjiang, Gansu, China