Changing a Tire for the Dummy Cyclist

Spoons seem a little... flimsy for this maneuver

We like the old adage that "Sometimes, even a blind pig finds an acorn"; like it so much that we had a sign made up and posted in the break room. It's right next to the Ben Franklin quotation, "We are all born ignorant but one must work hard to remain stupid." When it comes to websites, eHow.com must have been one of those hard workers, which is why it (and other niche sites Leaf Group has moved eHow.com content to) remains a rich vein of dumbassery. Take, for instance, Janos Gal, who visited "How to Remove a Schwinn Bicycle Tire"¹ upon the site, which promptly moved it to Healthfully.com.

Before you go any further, check out what our sister blog The Fixit Zone has to say on the topic. Excuse the weird formatting, it's the fault of the idiot programmers at Google who updated blogspot in 2020...

Gal's instructions pretty much fall into the blind pig category, at least in part. Take this introductory paragraph, for instance:

"Having the right tools to change the tires on your bike can make things a lot easier if a tire bursts. Better still, you can simply change the tire with the use of a couple of table spoons [sic]."

Janos' bio suggests that English is his second language, thought not what might be his first. Nevertheless, the DMS content editor was supposed to correct grammatical mistakes like "table spoons" before the dreck was published. Correcting the  notion that you can use tablespoons for tire levers² – you probably can't, because the handles will bend – should have fallen to someone who, unlike both Gal and the content editor, knows that bicycle tires don't "burst." Among the many cyclists on our staff, only one has ever seen an explosive blowout, and that was a bubble of inner tube pinched between bead and rim. But we digress...
Janos gets some of it right: take the wheel off the bike, although nothing about how the smart cyclist shifts the rear derailleur to the smallest cog. It's when he gets to the nitty-gritty that his instructions fail:

• "Do not use sharp items as they can poke a hole into the inner tire." – We're certain he meant inner tube.
• "Push the other spoon underneath the outer time [sic] about 5 inches away from the first spoon." – Ummm, we dunno: maybe "between the rim and the tire"?
• "Be careful not to pinch your fingers between the tire and the rim when you are prying the tire off the wheel." – Dude, you would need some skinny-ass fingers to do that!

As a general rule, we don't slap around people for grammatical mistakes if English isn't their first language (unless they're supposedly giving grammar advice). On the other hand, eHow always prided itself on the "quality" of its content, meaning (we guess) that J-school and English grads were supposed to correct grammatical mistakes. It's a good thing they didn't correct factual errors, too, or we'd have fa-a-a-a-a-ar fewer Dumbass of the Day Candidates like Janos!

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how_7672693_remove-schwinn-bicycle-tire.html

² Supposedly you can use the handle of a spoon (or fork) as a tire lever, though Gal didn't say "handle"; but we still don't think one would survive the attempt unless you're removing a sew-up or a very loose foldable. It sure isn't gonna work on a mountain bike tire with a wire bead...

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