I’m just here waiting for the pic of the gu packet used to seal a massive gash in a tire from like 15 years ago.

Gu ? Too expensive and exotic for around these parts.(and they're gopping too).

Marathon (Snickers to the American audience) wrapper and grass, on a Panaracer Cinder tyre side wall gash.
+ duck tape wrapped all the way around the tyre + rim (praise be disc brakes)
😎

On a club ride a few years ago - 60 miles from home- one of my team mates snapped off his rear mech hanger. Asked him to choose a single gear to ride in- and shortened his chain to get him home single speed- he was only about 20 mins behind us at the end. Ta da.

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Graham Wilson
USAT Level III Elite Coach
http://www.thewilsongroup.biz

Did you start this thread just for me?

Where to begin...

Let's start with rear derailleur pulley bolt went bye-bye. Found the pulley, then found a nail on the road that hadn't found a tire yet, stuck it through, bent it by pounding it with a rock, made it 40 miles home.

-bobo

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"What's good for me ain't necessarily good for the weak-minded."

Group ride here in SoCal, World Class Track Rider's handlebar SNAPS off at stem , as in hanging by the brake cables.. Dude rides 10+ miles back to home as "group ride" pace HOLDING the broken bar part and top of the remaining other side of the bar. Not a fix per see. But he had zero choice./ no Uber, had places to go (train on the track). So he rode. Still to this day, was the most amazing feet of figuring out how to ride your broken bike home.

Was taking a youth group on a 20km group ride. One of the other adult chaperones rolled up with his old clunker city cruiser bike. The pedal axle was attached to the crank, but the plastic pedal body had long since been sheered off. "You can't ride that, you'll destroy your feet?!" I said (he was 60 years old). He said it was fine and he could handle it. African immigrant from Nigeria, used to being uncomfortable.

As we were already far from home at the meeting point, I had to mcgyver it. Luckily, my tool kit had long piece of duct tape that I keep rolled up around a marker. I should have taken a picture of it, but I basically made a pedal shape and pad for his foot over the pedal axle and he completed the ride. I gave him an old stock pair of pedals that we all have too many of sitting in our garage after that ride...

Not mid ride per se, but one time I popped a spoke on my commute into work. Wheel was technically rideable but looked like one bad bump and I'd lose the true.

I spent my lunch hour using scotch tape to try to hold the spoke in place, and then very gingerly rode my way home.

I did that at IM Louisville 2011. Hit a screw that put a 1cm square hole in the tire. Booted it with the gel wrapper and rode another 60 miles to the finish.

Got another flat at IM Louisville 2015. No heroics, just a normal tube change, missed KQ by 22 seconds.

Man, that's an awful situation. How did you handle it?

On another note, the wrapper trick seems ingenious!

I always have a little Gorilla tape wrapped around the cross bar for training rides. The last time it came in useful, something had cut right through the tire and tube instant flat gaping hole. Spare inner and tape inside and outside the tire. Got me twenty miles home. It has a place of honour in basement workshop.

When I was a junior, one of my riding buddies had a gash in his tire. All we had to patch it was a $20 bill. At the time it seemed crazy to use a $20 since I had a crappy job getting minimum wage. It worked and he rode if for 2 or 3 months.

A different time, one of my teammates tacoed his wheel in the middle of nowhere Iowa. My coach was lifting it above his head and smashing in down on the cement as hard as he could to realign it enough to ride home. I can still see the sweat streaming down his face in the summer heat as he struggled. I have no recollection if it worked.

good times!

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Jogging - I guess you just run for an extended period of time

Flatted a 90mm wheel, and only had a spare tube with a 45mm valve stem. Used a Starbucks straw as a makeshift valve extender (they actually fit fairly tight on a presta stem) and was able to get the tire to ~55psi and limp home.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

Post college, was traveling with six guy friends and we rented bikes (think beach cruisers) to bike around Ankor Wat in Cambodia. About half way through the ride, the chain on one of them snapped. We had zero tools, but one of our friends had a length of rope (it was his dad's essential travel item) that we used to tow that bike behind another for the remainder of the ride.

I did Florida 4 weeks later and got the KQ.

Wrappers work well as do dollar bills.

This is from Epic5 a few years ago.

i broke a shift lever on some Rival shifters during Joe Martin Stage Race. I had external cable routing on an old S-Works E5 frame. I used the barrel adjusters that i could reach in order to get the default cog in the back to be about 3 up from the bottom (probably around a 13t) and any time i hit a climb i would reach down and pull the exposed cable to get the bike to go to the easiest gear, and then have to hold it there in place until the top of the climb.

I think i had to do about 90 miles like that, and got a pack finish and didn't lose any GC time.

One time a teammate of mine had his saddle fall off in a stage race in Texas. He dumped his water bottle out, took the cap off, and put the bottle upside down over his seatpost so he could sit on it instead of the post. I think he ended up on the GC podium.

About 30 years ago, I crashed on a mountain descent, and my rear wheel was tacoed. I still had several miles left before I was out of the mountains, so I did the same thing. Got the wheel true enough that it barely rubbed the brake pads. That wheel held up for another week of riding while I waited for a new rim to arrive.


I need to remember this one...

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"I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10, and I don't know why!"

Great thread!

1. I am also a member of the dollar bill boot club. Mine lasted for the 20 or so miles it took to get home. That is a long time to live with the thump-thump-thump every time the dollar rolls against the ground.

2. Not an ingenious fix, just very fortunate: I broke two spokes simultaneously about 50 miles from my car. I knew there was a bike shop nearby, so I hobbled the 4 miles to get there. It was the middle of the summer and the store was busy with repairs. These guys only had one straight pull spoke that was the right size, the other one in stock was too long (or maybe a blank, I can't remember) so they cut and rolled it. They trued it as much as possible, and sent me to the counter to pay. I get to the cashier and they were only going to charge me like $15. This was only ten years ago. I told them they HAD to charge me more than that, but they insisted so I bought as many gels as I could fit in my pockets as thanks.

3. A guy I was riding with broke a chain. I had a spare missing link that would work, but there was a remnant of the old link still attached that we couldn't get off. We got the broken end to the bottom of the drivetrain and then held it together with some sticks, grass, and rubber bands from our spares. The idea was that he could pedal a quarter turn then backpedal and do it again over and over. We spent quite some time working on the MacGyvered link, and it worked okay for a while until he either pulled back too far or pedaled too far, and it broke. At that point, we just put the chain in his pocket and we took turns with either me pushing or him holding on to my jersey. Was about a half hour of this. I think my jersey was permanently stretched. Worth it to not hear the grief of our girlfriends if we had called them to pick us up. In hindsight, I definitely should have just gone ahead alone, got in the car, and then retrieved him.

3b. On vacation at Panama City Beach with the same girlfriend from above. We were driving for dinner, and passed by a guy walking his tri bike in cleats down the road. I was immediately thinking we should help him. My girlfriend sensed this and asked if she should turn around. I said, no, I am sure he is fine. She then wisely asked if it was going to distract me all dinner if we didn't help him. I told her it would. So we went back and stopped. We ended up just giving him a ride home. IIRC, he had forgotten his spare bag, and flatted about 7 miles from home. Obviously he was very appreciative for the help.

4. I broke a shoe latch in a crash during a crit. I was able to find some electrical tape in the pits and they let my back in. Not ingenious, but effective. It was over a month before I got a replacement buckle latch thing. I used tape for every ride until it came in!

Duct taped my buddy's slashed tire from the inside. Also some duct tape on the tube to prevent it poking out. Much more effective than dollar bill or gel wrapper. He just wanted to get the 5 miles to the bike shop - he got the whole 15 miles home and was able to use one of his tire stash instead of buying a new tire.

Several times I've just put a small amount of duct tape over a small leak in a tube. This is in bad weather or getting dark when I just didn't have the patience to change the tube and didn't want to risk puncturing the new one due to an undetected thorn. Can usually extend a 4 minute flat to 15 or 20 mins and enough to get home with maybe one short stop for pumping. Can then fix the flat in comfort.

For MTB, I've twice bunged a small piece of shoptowel in a tubeless tire tread with an allen key to fix a flat that a standard bacon strip wouldn't seal. One held for 3 months and the other is still holding a year later. Sometimes looking around for suitable trash or bunging in some grass can be enough in an emergency.

Duct taped broken shoe as well and used it for a full cx season. In sticky mud this can be useful even for working buckles as I've seen racers leave their shoe behind in the mud more than once.

My favorite road story is the guy from Denver in the break in a P12 race in Texas who broke his cleat - opened a power bar and chewed on it a bit to soften it up. Stuck the shoe in his back pocket and the powerbar in his sock under his arch. Deformed enough to stick in the pedal and he was able to get some power down - finished 6th.

Ok so not strictly a repair job but back in early 90’s my race bike was a hand built Reynolds 653 tubed machine with Mavic GP4 tubular rim wheels. Training on it one day carrying just one spare tubular I got a puncture. Replaced the tubular but then got two more punctures. So 25 miles away from home in the middle of the English Lake District (no cell phones in those days) I rode all the way back on flat tubs, being careful to ride as upright and in as straight a line as possible. Those wheels were bomb proof though. Still had them, and they were as true as the day they were built, until I gave them away a couple years ago.

About a year ago I had a minor spill on my Trek Superfly hard tail about 10 miles from starting point. As they say, carbon is strong until it isn’t, and the seat tube must have taken a rock strike. Got back up nonchalantly and started to ride and that was a no go. Top tube was was crush deformed and seat tube was pretty much sheared in half. Was looking like a long walk back. On the plus side it was mostly downhill. As I was walking a found a beer can and an idea sprouted in my head. I always carry way too much crap in my Camelbak and it saved my this time. I had a handful of zip ties and a pair of pliers. Used some zip ties to fortify the top tube a bit and keep it from deforming too much, and took the pliers to the beer can and skinned out a sheet of aluminum. Wrapped that around sheared section of seat tube, slapped some zip ties on it, and I had a bike that was barely safe to coast down hill back to car. Pedaling caused a dangerous amount of flex, but just coasting saved me a ton of time. Bike shop have me a real interesting look when I brought it in. With any luck the pic will upload to this post. Have also seen a snapped chain stay with a piece of wood used as a splint to hold it together to get back. No cyclist wants to walk their bike if they don’t have to.