Fixing Punctures / Puncture Repair / Exploding Tubes

My father taught me how to make my own puncture repair kit when I was a young lad and, with the odd adaption down the years, it's stood me in good stead ever since. I once once asked him who'd taught him the technique and got a 'black ear' (his word for a clip round the lughole) for my troubles (he was a somewhat macho and truculent coal miner from Glyncorrwg village in deepest South Wales... they breed them to be proudly self-reliant in those parts, so my question was probably perceived by him as a slight to his self-sufficiency skillset). Anyway, he rode everywhere on Bessy, a bike he built himself, mainly from cast iron trussle rods salvaged from a Victorian bunkbed frame (it weighed a tonne!), held together with bell rope and tanner's glue (i have some photos if anyone's interested). The tyres were constructed using an incredibly durable compound made of refluxed canvas, woven coal flax and tesselated pig iron shards (no doubt pilfered from the slag heap belonging to the puddling forge in the next valley). (Interestingly Bridgestone founder Lyoto Machida, an adolescent at this time who was in Britain touring London music halls with his boarding school's production of Gilbert & Sullivan's Makido, was evacuated to Glyncorrwg on the eve of the Second World War, and I've always wondered whether he met, and swapped notes on tyre production, with my father... if so, where are his royalties, Machida!!!). The compound was so tough that his tyres rarely punctured, so when Ol' Bess "opened 'er mouth' (as he called a puncture!) it was always a bit of a special occasion on the boat (we lived on a canal barge). We didn't have electricity back then, so he'd let off a few naval flares, which created this ethereal glow all around the boat that was truly magical. Mother would cook up a batch of treacle taffy and my brother and I would sing hymns while father would winch Bessy onto the roof of the aft cabin, up-end her and lay her out on a pages torn from The Rhonda Echo. He used a pudding slice and skillet whisk to lever the tyre from the rim, then he'd hunker down on his hands and knees, take three or four huge lungfuls of air and, with the mouth of the valve clamped between his teeth, blow the tyres up like a balloon. It was me and my brother's cue to stop singing. You could hear a pin drop in the next valley as father listened intently for the tell-tale hiss of air. ("There's the snake!" he'd yell!) With the source of the leak pinched between thumb and forefinger, he'd press the hole onto a pre-prepared smear of bacon fat, bitchumen, locksmith's proofing and coal tar. This was to par-seal the hole while he readied the patch with beeswax. For the patch, father used a section of horse hide soaked in his own urin (i imagine this was cut from the corpse of a pit pony or knicked from the village slaughterhouse, but he used to tell us it was 'dragon skin', which, on reflection, was as much a reflection of his fierce nationalist pride as it was his vivid imagination). While the patch adhered itself to the drying glue, father and mother would join us in a few verses of the Welsh national anthem, with a few choice expletives about the English appended to the chorus and final verse. Then, in a final flourish worthy of the Great Soperendo, father would spin around on the spot like a dervish, then swallow dive into the canal. We'd all be screaming with excitement at this point, high on taffy mollases and - come to think of it - the calcium phosphate we'd inhaled from the debris trail left by the flares. He'd resurface, gasping for air, with a clump of canal weed in his teeth. He'd pass this to me and it was my solemn duty to 'seal the tyre proper wi' locks o' da mermaid's hair' as he called it. And that was it. Job done.All in all, it was a fascinating, almost ritualistic process, something that I think we can all learn a lot from.