#1: tubes degrade with age. My experience says "no," at least gauging "age" by single decades. Pre-sealant I routinely rode tubes with up to 3 dozen patches accumulated over many years and they worked as well as new tubes. If a tube was 50 years old I'd look at it more than quickly and casually, but "old" applied to tubes, IME, is a very generous term.
#2. Skinny tubes in fatter tires. For a while I used 23-25 mm tubes in 42 mm tires and they worked well. The skinnies were ultralights, too. "Well" instead of "perfectly" because my use involved sealants and OS regular did not seal as well in a skinny tube against a goathead puncture as well as it does a 40 mm tube, also extralight -- the stretching must make the hole a bit bigger. But since punctures sans goatheads are, glass-strewn dowtown streets apart, so rare, skinnies in fatters can work well. (I've used 1" tubes in 2" tires and 26" tubes in 29" tires, briefly but successfully. Back to the initial query: IME, bad manufacturing can be a cause of such splits, but the OP had the problem with several different makes. On Thu, Aug 3, 2023 at 12:10 PM Brian Turner <brokeb...@gmail.com> wrote: > These type of flats are basically the only flats I've received in the past > decade or so - mostly because I am very particular and adamant about > checking my air pressures before riding. As such, it has caused me to > retain tubes for probably longer than most folks, and I'm assuming that has > in turn led to issues with the tubes degrading there at the base of the > valve stems. That said, it is very odd that you had three such flats in the > same ride... very curious. I'm sorry that happened to you, and hopefully > you can find the source of the issue! > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfgs6HVNUOWY2ukkprarhZ_8uhg507ysRwOxB5txWbcnDtQ%40mail.gmail.com.
