Editor's Notebook

editor’s notebook

It will not surprise anyone who has ever talked to me for more than 5 minutes that I like to tell stories. As a youngster growing up hanging around my family’s gasoline station, I had lots of opportunities to listen to the stories told by the loafers who gathered at the there. One of my favorite story tellers was the late Aage Jensen but he wasn’t the only one, there were many others.

Recently I was telling a younger person about the day a dump truck driver stopped at the station and asked me to fix one of the tandem dual tires on his trucks. As a general rule, independent dump truck drivers are always in a hurry for they are paid by the number of loads hauled each day.

That day I was alone at the station and trying to wait on pump island and store customers both of which had priority over a flat tire customer. I suggested he go on into town and have the tire fixed at one of the two tire stores. He didn’t want to do that and asked if he could use our tools.

I told him to go ahead. In those days, we used a wedge and sledge to break the tire down and get to the tube. In a hurry and probably angry because I wouldn’t do it, he took a mighty swing with the sledge and missed the wedge. The sledge bounced back and him in the forehead. That was the end of his do-it himself tire repair. He suddenly had time to wait for me.

As I related the story to the younger person, he looked at me and asked, “Why didn’t you use the tire machine?”

His question got me to thinking about how much tire repair has changed.

When I was two-years-old, my grandfather invited me to the station to help him fix tires.

It was a time when all tires had tubes and the tubes were made of different kinds of rubber. The wheels have also changed and the style dictates how they are taken apart. When I was two, the station was still being asked to fix tires mounted on wooden wheels.

We didn’t have a tire machine. All tires were dismantled with hand tools.

I remember when we got our first bead breaker. I thought it wonderful.

To spread the tire, there was a scissors like contraption. Dad was afraid I might pinch a finger so I was never allowed to touch it.

Once a hole was found in the tube, a patch had to be vulcanized on. The tube was buffed on a grinder to clean the repair spot, glue was spread over the hole and a piece of rubber cut to serve as the patch. Then tube and patch material were put in the electric vulcanizer and left for certain number of minutes. If overdone the tube ruined. If not long enough, the patch didn’t stick. Heat melted the patch and allowed the glue to hold it in place. Sometimes I applied the patch in the wrong place and the procedure had to be repeated.

It wasn’t very successful but we had an alternative rigging that required setting the patch material on fire.

The first advance was the purchase of a test tank. In the winter-time, it was kept inside the station office so the water in the test tank wouldn’t freeze. It came with a corset in which the tube was inserted and then inflated. This allowed a higher inflation without bursting the tube and was good for finding slow leaks. Sometimes other tire shops that lacked such a device asked us to repair tubes with slow leaks.

The introduction of tubeless tires required the purchase of a tire machine.

Our old method of disassembly and assembly of the tire was likely to damage a tubeless tire’s bead and cause the tire to leak.

The arrival of the tire machine was an exciting day for this 11-year-old youngster. It meant I was finally big enough and strong enough to fix a tire without the assistance of an adult.

Today federal safety regulations would certainly kept me out of the tire shop at two and most likely at age 11. But I consider those days to have been good days in which I learned a lot.

There have been so many changes in tire repair procedures since that I would need to be retrained before being allowed to work in a tire shop.

It has been years since I tried to repair an automobile or truck tire though I do have primitive but better tools than Grandfather had when he enlisted my aid.

I have a homemade machine which gets the assembly and disassembly off the ground, a bead breaker much like my father purchased at an automobile dealership liquidation auction and a much safer spreader than the one I watched Grandfather use.

In recent years, my tire repair has been limited to bicycle tires. Seems my wife hounds me all to frequently to repair one of her bicycle tires. I say it wouldn’t be necessary if she would refrain from riding through the sticker patches.

Fixed one for her Saturday. Thankfully, all it needed was some Slime and re-inflation. Thankfully, it a patch must be installed, I still have the old, belt driven buffer we used at the station. It probably wouldn’t sell for a dollar on an auction, but it works fine for buffing bicycle tubes. If you get aggressive, the belt slips the buffing wheel slows down. I tried a newer one once and it worked so fast I buffed a large hole in the tube. As a result, I had to buy a new tube.

——————

Hopefully, you haven’t tried the granola recipe published in this space last week. I did and the next morning it didn’t pass the taste test. Told Rita what I had done and she asked, “Didn’t you add 1 teaspoon of vanilla?”

Nope, I didn’t and I had made a triple batch. So while delivering papers Wednesday I bought a sack of raisins and double the amount of raisins added. I find it just find with no vanilla and double raisins.