Changing Bike Tires for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCXXVIII

flat bicycle tire

The universe of online freelancers apparently shares a critical attribute with the world of job seekers: resumé inflation, We've long since lost count of the "communications" grads who claim they're experts at home improvement but don't know a hawk from a handsaw. To that number, we add people who claim to be experienced bike mechanics or even garden-variety cycling enthusiasts, but don't seem to know a seat post from a chain ring. We're thinking today of WiseGEEK.com contributor Malcolm Tatum, who claims an "interest [in] cycling," although his bona fides seem pretty weak in his  SportsnHobbies.com post, "How do I Change a Bicycle Tire? (with pictures)."

Mal dumped this rubbish on the site back in 2008, which is not long enough ago that his claim,

"Newer bicycles sometimes are manufactured with release levers that allow the removal of a wheel from the axle with one simple push or pull..."

...could be considered accurate. Our first quick-release skewers dated back to the '70s, and the things were invented almost 100 years ago. What Tatum should have said was that anything but the cheapest kiddie bikes has a quick-release. That's not to mention that a) you don't release the wheel from the axle, you release it from the dropouts, and b) it's a little more complex than "one simple push or pull"!

Be that as it may, Tatum must have tried to crib directions from someone who knew how to do this (someone like this guy), because he got some of the process right. He got a lot of details wrong, but the general order of steps was right. Take, for instance, this sentence: "Work around the rim until the edge or hem of the tire is lapped over the rim." We looked, and there are a total of nine repetitions of the phrase "hem of the tire" online, two of them Malcolm's work and five of them nonsense. We ran a search, and Tatum never used the term of art, "bead." Yeah: there's an expert... One who doesn't really understand the process if he says, "To change a bicycle tire inner tube, simply remove it from the interior of the tire and work in a fresh one." Someone with experience doing this might... in fact would certainly mention the valve. There's also this crap:

"...gently begin to work the tire and tube back onto the rim."

Gently? You need some pretty strong thumbs to finish this job! 

Tatum never once mentioned such complications as opening rim brakes to allow removal of the wheel or how to extract a rear wheel's gear cluster from the chain. That, and he never mentioned checking the tire to find whatever had caused a puncture in the first place. Those are all bits of information that would be useful to anyone not working on a child's one-speed with coaster brakes. And while we're at it, Malcolm, an experienced bike mechanic doesn't completely remove the tire to change a tube!

No, we don't think our Dumbass of the Day had changed more than a couple of bike tires in his lifetime, and the last one was a decade or so before he wrote this garbage.

DDIY - TIRES