in time to come, you will not be able to see the old bathtub outside the bicycle repair shop or the tyre repair shop in singapore. with tubeless bicycle and motor-cycle tyres, the repairman no longer need to submerge the inflated inner tube in a bathtub of water to check the effectiveness of his handiwork.
picture from national archies of singapore
you will be hard-pressed to find a bicycle repair shop in your neighbourhood. these days, even bicycle tyres are tubeless. if the tyre is defective, the bicycle shop will sell you an inner tube. however, if your bicycle tyre is one that still has an inner tube and that is punctured, you can easily mend it yourself. you buy a patch to stick over the punctured part.
in the days when we also rode bicycle with inner tubes and when we had a puncture, we would go to the bicycle/motorcycle repair shop to have it fixed. that was when the discarded bathtub came in useful. the repairman would inflate the punctured inner tube and then passed it under the surface of the water (in the bathtub) to ascertain the spot where the puncture had occurred.
he would mark the spot, dry the area around the spot and then he would use a metal file to file the area. he cut a piece of rubber from an old discarded inner tube, filed it and then applied contact glue to the two surfaces - the spot that he had filed and one side of the rubber piece.
i can still remember how he went about afixing the rubber patch to the punctured spot. he would stretch that affected part of the inner tube over his fist. after filing and applying the glue, he would have to wait for the glue to dry. to hasten the drying process, he would blow his breath over the area.
those days when motor-car tyres had inner tubes, when we had a puncture, we did not go to the workshop at the petrol station to have it fixed. instead, we would drive it to one of these bicycle-cum-motor-cycle repair shops. the mechanic would jack up the car, remove the offending tyre and follow more or less the same procedure. however, for bigger inner tube, there was one more step. they would use heat to fuse the two pieces of rubber together.
i think in those early days, the cost of repair for a punctured bicycle tyre was about twenty or thirty cents whereas for a car tyre, we had to pay $1.50 or $2.00.
where, in singapore, can you still find an old bathtub outside a shop?
