Flat Tire!

It was too hot to ride my beloved little folding bike to work for most of this summer, and for most of that time, I couldn't see where I was going, anyway. But now it's cooler, and my eyes & glasses are working again. So I went downstairs yesterday and hauled the bike up from storage in the basement.

As you might imagine, both tires were very soft from just sitting there. I went up to City Bikes in Adams Morgan this morning and got a nice new bike pump.* The regular standing pumps with air pressure gauges looked too big, and besides, they're not the kind you can take with you when you're riding the bike. So I bought one called an AirStik, made by Blackburn Design. www.blackburndesign.com


Here is an AirStik all folded up and ready to be mounted on my bike frame (with cute little rack, not pictured). This model can accompany me on my journeys so I can inflate my tyres if needed without having to go to Adams Morgan or Georgetown or Dupont Circle (where there are bike shops with air hoses). So far so good....

However, I can't figure out how to work it. I know, you pump the handle and it squirts air into the tire. But it's not quite that simple.


Here is the AirStik fully extended and ready to pump air--with great good luck, I might add!! The silver lever on the right end of the pump is humorously called the "thumblock lever." When it's extended, as in this picture, something is supposed to lock, but goddess only knows what that might be. I can't see anything moving or locking or doing anything different from when it's not extended.



And here is the ingenious nozzle taken apart so that I can reconfigure it to fit the valve on my tire (I keep wanting to type "tyre", as Peggy might these days. It seems much jollier than plain old "tire"--the likes of which, by the way, are making me tired!!)


Here is the nozzle put together so that the little pointy thing will compress the other little pointy thing inside the valve and allow air to enter in. That's the theory, anyway.

I've been pumping and pumping, and the tyre/tire only gets FLATTER since every time I hit the valve with the pump, more air escapes from the tyre/tire.

The next step will be to return to City Bikes in Adams Morgan and ask them to show me how to work the pump--complete with demonstration on actual bike tyre/tire in the shop. And complete with training exercise wherein I do the pumping, etc.

It's not that I don't love City Bikes or Adams Morgan. They have more cool restaurants and bars up there than you can shake a stick at, including the famous dive, Madam's Organ. (Note to grandchildren and other tender sorts--I have NEVER been in there. It's not that I have anything against boozing. It's that I can't HEAR the jazz being played.) (I do have my limits.)


* The pump, btw, was a gift. Thanks, Boo