It’s been one of those weekends when lots of things decided to break. It started on Friday evening, when I noticed a rusty damp patch in the kitchen ceiling whilst eating dinner. This only meant one thing – a leak. I took a spotlight out of the ceiling and – by using the camera on my phone – had a look into the ceiling space. I couldn’t see any pipes, but after checking the radiator upstairs it turned out to be a valve that had worked loose. Worst of all, I couldn’t isolate the radiator so I had to drain the entire system.
What followed was yet more problems. First, the drain valve broke, so I needed to get a new one, then my son appeared with his scooter and said, “The wheel has gone funny” and finally we found that the main stop-tap in the house wa jammed open.
So, after using the outside stop valve in the footpath outside our home, getting a new drain valve, re-fixing the radiator valve which was leaking, putting the water back on, painting over the leaky brown stain in the ceiling and cleaning up the associated mess; I finally got time to look at the scooter wheel.
This is what a “flatspotted” skate or scooter wheel looks like. If it isnt too bad, you can try my fix.
Turns out it had developed a “flat spot” on the rear wheel. This happens if you do a huge skid on a scooter wheel. The wheel isn’t rubber, so you can damage it fairly easily through misuse. Anyhow, after Googling it and looking through various YouTube videos, it was a toss-up between getting a new wheel or trying to fix it. The latter seemed to involve a load of machinery that I didn’t have in the garage, so I opted for my own low-budget method.
The results were perfect – the wheel is now perfectly round again and the scooter no longer “bounces” when you’re moving on it.
Yes, I know it’s not really a smartphone-related video, but hey… 🙂