Tire Plugs for Dummies

tire repair with plug

It's sad, we know, but we see a distressing number of "how-to" posts on the internet that go into great detail about the easy part of a project, while glossing over the stuff that's hard. We can't say for certain, but we suspect it's because the people writing posts didn't understand the instructions they're rewording, so they just skipped over the confusing bits. Today's DotD nominees is a prime example: she's Kaye Lynne Booth, found over at GardenGuides.com trying to explain "How to Fix a Tubeless Wheelbarrow Tire."¹

Booth's opening statement is pure lily-gilding:

"Fixing a tubeless wheelbarrow tire is fairly easy, if you know how, and can mean the difference between completed a job or leaving it half done."

Kaye Lynne's problem is that she didn't know how to do this job, so she went to Instructables.com to see what some other freelancer had written. You should note that, at some time after Booth had published this, DMS (the eHow.com parent company) forbade using Instructables as a source... Whatever the case, Kaye Lynne's instructions go something like this:

1. Remove the wheel, locate the leak by dunking the wheel in water, remove the tire – although Booth went into excruciating detail about how to get the axle loose, she failed to mention that the leak won't emit bubbles unless the tire is at least partially inflated. Her instructions for removing the tire are, at best, ambiguous.
2. Use your plug kit: "Push the plug through the opening in the plug insertion tool until the length of plug is even on each side... Push the plug into the hole until about 1/3 of the rubber strips are left outside the tire, and then pull the tool straight back out, leaving the plug in the tire." – Which is it? "the length of plug is even on each side" (whatever that means) or "1/3 of the rubber strips are left outside the tire"?
3. "Put the tire back on the rim..." – Kaye Lynne wrote 54 words for getting the tire off the rim, but that's all she wrote for putting it back on...

Yup, "fairly easy"...  with a couple of exceptions. While Booth included instructions for getting the tire bead to remount in the wheel, she neglected to mention cleaning the wheel to prevent leakage around the bead. Plus, her version of the instructions wouldn't work as written. Given the omission of some rather important information from Kaye Lynne's steps, it's obvious that she'd never patched a wheelbarrow tire; or any tire for that matter. When people fake their expertise on a job like this one, we are quite happy to hand them their own, personal Dumbass of the Day award.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   gardenguides.com/94752-fix-tubeless-wheelbarrow-tire.html

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DD - TIRES