alesupper, you might be wondering how you can practice using your new puncture repair kit, without making a hole in your (or your neighbour’s) tyre?
Easy….
Go along to any local motorcycle tyre fitting place and ask them if they’ll let you have an old tyre. Alternatively, just wait until you yourself need new tyres and ask for one of your old tyres back.
Take it home and drill a hole in it. It doesn’t need to be huge. Then practice using the device, the advantage being that you can see the inside of the loose tyre, so you can see how it works.
Not least, try out your new air pump by pumping up your tyres. Why? Just to make sure that it doesn’t trip your canbus limit and fail. It is best to discover this now, rather than later. Simply running it doesn’t test it, you need to put it under load ie. Pumping pressure into a tyre. If yiu find it does trip, re[rt back here for a cure…. Or take a foot pump.
If it’s any comfort. When I ran Wapping’s Wanders, covering 10’s of thousands of man miles in Europe, we had only two tyre leaks. One was a proper puncture (repaired on the side of the road) and the other was a slowly deflating tyre, caused by the locking nut on the valve being loose. We also repaired one third party’s bod’s tyre, when we found him sitting forlornly in a car park. Two, maybe three, tyre problems in thousands of miles. It doesn’t mean it can’t happen though, simply that it’s (possibly) unlikely. Best to be ready.