Motorcycle Safety & Driveability: Inner tube failure expert, tire blowouts, tube failure

Question
Pat: I am an attorney in Washington State.  I hava client who was badly injured when the front tire of his 1999Harley failed on Interstate 5.  We had a motorcycle expert dismount the tire and it appears the innertube failed.  I am looking to retain a motor cycle inner tube epert.  Do you know of an expert in the field?  Thanks Dave Wieck.

Answer
I apologize in advance for being presumptuous:

I'd give it up before this guy wastes too much of your time. If you're going after the tube company, you're going to lose. The guy who said it was a tube failure was probably the guy who installed it.

Catastrophic tire failures are very, very rare and almost always due to the owner's poor maintenance habits.

Most tire blowouts are due to underinflation. Everybody--and I mean EVERYBODY--knows that. Tires and tire pressure are the most important things to check before every ride. Many idiot motorcyclists don't give tire pressure a second thought.

I'll bet if you took a pressure gauge to the other tire right now, you'll find that one's underinflated, too. It's an owner problem, not a tube problem. Let the guy take responsibility for his own stupidity.

If an inner tube in a motorcycle tire just "failed," when properly installed and inflated, I can't imaginge it would do anything but deflate over a period of 30-60 seconds. A conscientious rider should have recognized it simply by the way the bike handled before it became a disaster. (It's not like a car--unless you have no nerve endings in your hands, you can feel what the front tire is doing through the handgrips.)

A skilled rider could have controlled a bike with a flat tire long enough to bring it to a safe stop.

An idiot rider would be taken completely by surprise and crash into the nearest jersey barrier, even if it was nowhere near his or her path of travel.

I'm sorry to be a jerk about this, but no one takes their own safety seriously enough. Motorcycles are not toys, they're heavy machines that requires skill and foresight.

If you still insist that it's not the rider's fault, try contacting a tube-type motorcycle tire manufacturer. My guess is your best source will be some sort of chemical engineer if the problem was indeed the tube.

It's a poor musician who blames his instrument.

Pat