$1 emergency tire repair

I wanted to share this trick with anyone who hadn't heard it before. A few years ago during a soapbox race with some guys from the San Fernando Valley Illegal Soap Box Federation (SFVISBF), the founder of the group Paul told me about a tire repair trick where when in a pinch, you can patch a hole in a tire with a dollar bill. Because the US bills are actually cloth and not paper, it is supposed to hold up decently. I recently got to the chance to try this out first hand.

After about 2000km on some super cheap tires, I got a flat this week and saw it was from running straight through my rubber into the inner tube. I had a new tube but not a new tire with me. I remembered Paul's advice and tried the dollar trick, placing it in the tire before the new inner tube. It worked like a charm. It got me the next 5 km to a bike shop and upon changing out the tire and examining the bill, I'd wager that it could have held up another 20 or 30 km based on the minimal wear on the tire. Not bad for $1.

Here are a couple pics I took before removing the dollar. That's the George Washington sealing the hole in the tire from before I deflated and swapped it out.
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Hmm... I wonder if a five dollar bill would work too? May be it will last 5 times longer?

what about a piece of old underwear? Those suckers wear like iron, and cost less than a buck.

SamTexas said:

Hmm... I wonder if a five dollar bill would work too? May be it will last 5 times longer?

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Haha I'm just glad I had a $1 with me and not a $100. Though, it would be nice to have a $100 for other reasons. You know, to cash it in and do 100 tire repairs, that is...

Hmmm...I wonder if a Canadian loonie would fix a snow tire?

If you carried a knife and the spare tube, you coulda just cut a piece of the old tube.

In a pinch, I'd never hesitate to stick anything I could find in the roadside litter in there. No shortage of possibilities in the us anyway. Plastic drink bottle, cardboard sixpack caddy, whatever.

If you carried a patch kit, you could patch the tire from the inside.

Now that I think about it, I bet a penny would work as good as a $100 bill.

dogman said:

If you carried a knife and the spare tube, you coulda just cut a piece of the old tube.

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I do always have my EDC knife on me, but cutting a piece of the old tube wouldn't work well IMO. Think about it. If the old tube failed because it got to intimate with the asphalt, then two layers of the tube would still fail. The tube rubber is going to break down much faster than the dollar bill. All of it's strength is in tension, and abrasion would be basically be the same hell on it that failed the tube in the first place.