Does anyone have a flamethrower?

Decapitated tyre levers

Look closely. See the decapitation of those innocent tyre levers pitting their pathetic tensile strength against the might of a swiss roll. A set of wheels designed by a bored Geneva physiotherapist short of broken thumb/bloodied elbow business. Aided and abetted by a pair of tyres with all the mallability of a religious nutcase.

A combination best dealt with by ignoring the traditional process of firing sharp plastic into your eye at somewhere beyond the speed of light*, and instead moving straight to the flamethrower. Because if I ever get a problem outside of my hammer equipped workshop, there is absolutely no chance of wrenching these rubber limpetsfrom the wheel. Short of going postal with an chainsaw.

Tempting. So very tempting.

And when the tyres do finally wear past the point of usable tread, the kindest thing for everyone involved shall be to ritually burn them in a viking style burial. This may be sooner than planned with Maxxis’s ever so amusing random sizing meaning the large volume tyre bought for the back would easily fit in the forks, currently occupied by something suffering from compound bulimia.

So probably a perfect combination for nutting trees and receiving a friendly wave from all the staff as I’m wheeled back into Hereford A&E. But while this is a better than evens chance of how this might end, it plays well against the nailed on certainty of me malleting myself senseless should I undertake anything other than kicking the bloody things occasionally. And giving them a meaningful glare.

Much of the evening was spend grunting while knelt on the floor and sliding around in a sea of washing up liquid. There’s good money to be had pedalling such things I’m told, but I’m struggling to see the pleasure it in. It wasn’t until Carol wearily answered my cry** for help that any potential personal Armageddon was averted.

In the previous two hours, I’d managed to fit one tyre. The wrong way around. Having checked it twice, busted a thousand blood vessels squeezing it onto the rim, fernangled air into its carcus through the simple dint of shouting at it, and triumphantly marked it as complete. It would not be an overstatement to consider my mental state to be somewhere between extensively vexed and borderline psychotic.

Carol spent exactly 10 seconds looking at the problem, having already suffered a 90 second spittle flecked rant to the tune of “it’ll never fit, I’ve hit it an everything, every time I stuff that bit in, that bit falls out***, that bit doesn’t work even if you hit it with this sledgehammer here and the whole fucking thing is fucked. And yes I am sulking. And no laughing at me isn’t helping

Her solution was both simple and elegant. Two minutes later we had something I assumed could only ever be mocked up with CGI. I was neither embarrassed or relieved just resigned to the never-more-obvious fact that I am a mechanical numpty with the patience of a special needs horsefly.

I tidied up in an old mans shuffle, wondering if my days of opposed thumbs were over. And while the overall plan of having a set of Mud specific wheels for the Forest augmented by rather more Malvern based hoops has come good, one has to consider the cost in pounds, injuries and penance.

It did make me wonder though, if there might not be a market – for those of us on the ‘under no circumstances give them a spanner‘ side of mechanical incompetence – for pneumatic tyres. Could make me enough of a fortune to fund reconstructive thumb surgery

* All that money spent attempting to disprove Einstein’s theory of relativity. Far easier to track the progress of a slippy tyre lever exciting the orbit of the rim and accelerating into the face of the poor bastard JUST TRYING TO FIT ONE SODDING TYRE.

** Oh FOR FUCKS SAKE, if there is a God, will you please manifest yourself preferably with some kind of duck-billed platypus tyre lever.

*** This, I assume, is how fat people get dressed. Either than or it’s a pretty good description of first sexual experiences.

3 thoughts on “Does anyone have a flamethrower?

  1. Bloke gets angry trying to do stuff
    Wife appears
    Bloke rants.. using very sweary words
    Wife listens
    Wife manages what took bloke 2 hours not to do in less than 5 minutes
    Bloke sulks and mutters

    I’ve just realised… Kate and I are exactly like you and Carol….

  2. Pingback: I want my life back » Let them eat cake…

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