I'm looking at the luggage space in Amphi and the "essentials" that I'm told
we
are taking on a road trip later this year and it doesn't work !
So, I'm thinking of leaving the spare wheel at home and taking a can of
FixaFlat. Has anyone used it in an Amphi wheel (tubed tyre) ? Also I see
there
is a sort of green gunge that's sold alongside FixaFlat, is it any better ?
=========
I'd keep that spare before I relied on just Fix-a-Flat or any similar
product. Fix-a-Flat will not handle much more than a nail hole, and even
that only for a short while. If your tire's shredded in the process of a
really good blowout and you're in the middle of nowhere, maybe you can use
that Fix-A-Flat to spell out "SEND HELP!" in the asphalt in big letters near
your car for passing aircraft to see. Fix-a-Flat and similar products are
really only intended to quickly get one out of a lousy spot to just few
miles up the road in order to have a minor flat attended to properly. If
the rim eats your tire on the way down, then you're out of luck and Lower
Bumfiddle's newest permanent resident.
As for the "green gunge" you refer to above, I assume that this would be
similar to the "Finilac" product available there in the UK (but pretty rare
on my side of the Atlantic). Finilac is not an aerosol. The way it works
is that one removes one's valve cores and squirts a bit of it into each tire
where it sloshes around stopping minor leaks before they start. Lots of
motorcyclists driving old British thumpers swear by the stuff, and I'm about
to add a similar product available in the USA called "PermaSeal" (available
at K-Mart) to my own Amphi's tires.
In your cramped situation described above, I might suggest throwing just a
tire (I'm sorry, that's "tyre" to you) and an inner tube into the trunk,
without the metal wheel. Clean up the tire inside and out a bit and you can
stuff it with your socks, HP Sauce, stolen crown jewels or whatever else you
need to smuggle onto the continent. Normally, lack of that heavy metal of
the spare wheel up in the forward section might make handling a wee bit
squirrellier than usual, but if you've got all your other swag up there you
probably won't notice any difference. And you'll rest easy knowing that at
least a tire's up there.
~Bilgemaster~
