Rema Tip Top

Rema TT01 TOUR Puncture Repair Kit — $ 2.99.
For whatever reason, this Tire Patch Kit to repair Bicycle flat tires produced in Germany is the rage of Bicyclists in the United States.
Get a grip, here! This is just a Tire Patch Kit… they’ve been around for ages… before I was born… and will probably be here after I gone.
When I got my first Bicycle in the «good ol’ days»… I remember these Tire Patch Kits that I got from my local Schwinn dealer. They consisted of a circular Tire Buffer, a tube of Rubber Cement, and a 5″ x 5″ piece of rubber with a cloth backing. You would cut off a piece of Rubber to whatever size you’d need to repair the puncture, scrape the area around the hole with the Tire Buffer, apply the Rubber Cement, wait for it to «set», a apply the Rubber Patch. Voila! And it came in a nice Red and White cylindrical cardboard can. If it was made by Schwinn… must have been good, right?
What prompted me to visit my local Bicycle Shop was the failure of Slime Skabs (
) to deliver reliable performance… sometimes they’d work… sometimes they didn’t. Inconsistency aside, I resorted to finding a Tire Patch Kit that used Rubber Cement. The sales person presented me with the Rema TT01 Tour Puncture Repair Kit.
The differences? The TT01 Tour contains five micro-​thin Patches with a backing of a thin metal… a pretty large rectangular one, and five round ones just large enough to patch a thorn or nail hole. The metal Tire Buffer is replaced by stiff Sandpaper for the scraping. The Rubber Cement is now called Vulcanising Liquid. Other than that, there is virtually no difference between the Patch Kit I used when I was a «punk» kid and the Rema TT01 Tour Kit.
Coincidentally, the puncture I «fixed» was the one Skabs could not fix.
FYI: Make sure the Vulcanising Liquid is «set»… some Bicyclists say to wait five minutes. I, on the other hand, visualize the «setting»… wait till the Vulcanising Liquid starts to turn whitish opaque in consistency. Firmly apply the Patch… and by the time you get your Bicycle Wheel assembled, you should be off and running… once you’ve pumped it back up.