VIDEO DESCRIPTION:
Welcome back to Planet Doug! In this episode of my Malaysian cycling adventure, things go from bad to catastrophic.
After a rear tire burst due to the tropical heat, I’m stranded in a quirky hotel in Rembau. My plan was simple: perform some emergency repairs using tire boots, swap the tires between wheels, and limp my bike 30km to the big city of Seremban for proper fixes. But as you’ll see, the bicycle repair gods had other plans.
I turned my hotel room into “Planet Doug Workshop,” discovered a mysterious link between tire stickers and blowouts, and narrowly avoid disaster—only to walk right into it. In a moment of overconfidence, a misaligned derailleur gets sucked into the spokes, snapping two of them on the drive side and leaving my “indestructible” wheel completely unrideable.
It’s a classic cascade of failures, a lesson in humility, and a raw look at the reality of long-distance touring.
In this video:
The Morning After the Explosion
The Plan: Hotel Room Bike Repair
Inside the “Planet Doug Workshop” (Hotel Room 2011)
Diagnosing the Damage: UV Rays and Barcode Stickers?
Applying Emergency Tire Boots
The Moment of Truth… and Disaster
Broken Spokes & A New Plan
Next up: I’m taking the train to Seremban with just my rear wheel to find a professional. Will they be able to save my tour?
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning. 7:30 in the morning. Sunday morning here in Rembau in Malaysia. And if you haven’t been following along, I’m in the middle of a bicycle journey in Malaysia trying to go from Port Dickson, which is on the coast near Kuala Lumpur, from Port Dickson to the border with Thailand before my Malaysian visa expires. So, I’ve got a little bit of a ticking clock situation. Not a big one, but it’s there. And I just started riding a couple of days ago and yesterday I tried to ride up into these mountains over there. You can’t see them, but those are the Titiwangsa mountains out there. And I got up early in the morning, packed up all my gear. I made it about 5 kilometers and then I hear a loud bang and I had no idea where the sound came from. I’m looking around, where did that explosion come from? And then I eventually found out that my rear tire exploded due to age and exposure to the hot tropical sun UV rays. The sidewall of the tire had become paper thin and the pressure of the tube inside the tire. The sidewall is what holds it all in. And the sidewall being weakened, it just exploded. There are actually three big holes that I found that I could stick my finger through and then one area that was like tissue paper about to explode and there was lots of other areas around. So anyway, that was the end of that. You can’t fix something like that. I had to turn around, walk my bicycle all the way back to this hotel, which was luckily only 5 km away, and check back into this hotel. And now I have to get new tires. So, that is you all caught up. And I have my traditional morning cup of instant coffee boiling hot right out of the kettle as you just saw. But yeah, something like this is inevitable on a cycling journey, motorcycle journey, even a backpacking journey. Things break, things get stolen, things get lost, and then you have to go shopping. So, right now, my goal for the next hour or two is to figure out what to do. I have certain plans in mind. Luckily, I’m about 30 kilometers away from a big city called Seremban. I think it’s the capital city of Negeri Sembilan province. It’s a big city. I checked on Google Maps. They’ve got a dozen bicycle shops of different types. And I found three bicycle shops that may or may not carry the kind of tire that I need. And I also need some repairs done because yesterday was really really windy as well. There’s been a windstorm for days. The wind has disappeared now as you can see and it’s been replaced by clouds. But because of the wind and because of the unusual situation, my bike blew over, landed on the rear derailleur and just bent it. And I mean I could fight with it myself using whatever tools I can find to try and re-bend it back into position, but if I’m going to go to a bike shop, a good bike shop, I think I’ll just hand my bike over to them and say like, can you work on the derailleur and get it dialed in for me? Let the experts take care of it. Rear derailleurs are tricky for me. I was thinking about this. There is something I can do a temporary fix on my bicycle. What I can do is take the rear wheel, move it to the front rim, take the front wheel, move it to the back, cuz the back takes more weight and more pressure and the front is in better condition. And I can repair my tire as much as I can. I have special what they call emergency tire boots where I can cover up all of the holes so that the tube doesn’t bulge through. I can keep the tire pressure low. So I would be able if I spend today working on the bike, tomorrow, Monday, I could ride my bike or I could even do it today. I could work on my bike this morning and then this afternoon ride to Seremban 30 km. And this is Planet Doug Studios at the moment. The Rembau Hotel or Hotel Rembau and I’m in room 2011. It’s a very eclectic hotel. They have their own style and the man that runs the place is extremely helpful, extremely friendly and he’s all about good customer service, but it is a very casual place. So, you have to sort of keep that in mind. It’s not organized and you may have an entirely different experience every time you show up because it is so casually run. But it’s so eclectic, so bizarre in so many ways. They basically DIYed the whole place. So you end up with like cast off furniture, where wherever this came from, whatever this is, you know, someone put some vinyl on top and hammered it down and aluminum foil kind of covering down there. And then the chair in the room is like a castoff from an old wedding hall or something. That’s just a standard chair underneath, but they cover it in that blue fabric. I associate that with wedding halls, you know, typical old wardrobe. The mattress, this one is like just awful. It’s like a gooey soft thing. It’s really hard to sleep in because it’s so soft. But there are positives as well. I mean, the guy believes in hooks and things, and I’m a big fan of hooks. Big towel rack over there with some hangers on it. Lots of electrical outlets, which is kind of cool. There’s even one up here. And then there’s more of them down here. And yeah, they have coffee cups, but this isn’t a kettle, so I don’t You can just get water from the water dispenser, you know, little bathroom. There’s a lot of design touches I don’t like. This always drives me crazy. Like I have a bathroom, but then you leave a big gap at the top of the door. I really like a bathroom to be super super private. So, like I wouldn’t want to be in here with another person or two other people and then everyone who goes in the bathroom, of course, you can just hear everything that’s going on in there, which I don’t and yeah, I just don’t like that. And they clearly even this bathroom, they had a shower here and I guess it stopped working completely. So then they just put in a new shower. So now there’s two complete showers in here. The other room I was staying in last time, they had the same setup, two showerheads, and I was curious, okay, what’s wrong with this one? So, I turned on the water and it all went blasting straight up to the roof. Went and turned into a shower from the roof. So, okay, we’re not going to use that one. And yeah, I think they’re very hands-off kind of hotel. They don’t really want to spend a lot of time on the rooms. They treat them as income earners and they don’t want to spend their life constantly dealing with stuff. So, they get this. Look at the size of that toilet paper roll. So, they never ever ever have to come up here to check on it or replace it. And not only that, they have two of them. How have you ever seen that much toilet paper in a single bathroom? But I guess that means yeah, less maintenance, right? They don’t have to keep checking up on things like that. And of course, for me, the mirror is always way too low. And if I’m shaving in the morning, I actually get a real exercise program. I really get a workout on my thighs cuz I have to lower myself so low. At the last minute before I went outside and in the heat and the humidity and the wind, which has kicked up a little bit again, I remembered that the owner of this hotel said that he’d be perfectly happy for me to bring my bicycle inside. I asked him whether he had other foreigners come through here, you know, on touring bicycles, and he says, “Yeah, yeah, all the time.” And he said, “You can put your bike by the office.” He said, “I can put my bike downstairs where I would keep it.” And then he said, “Yeah, just bring it up to your room if you want, no problem.” So, yeah, I remember that. So, voila. I did that. I brought the bike up to my room, and it’s going to be so much nicer to do the work up here. You can just relax. The air conditioner here is not exactly a powerhouse, but it does get a lot cooler than outside. There’s the weather out there right now. No sun, but it is humid. So, my only other option would be like down on the pavement there. That’s where I was going to work on the bike around these pylons, but then yeah, obviously for a thousand reasons. It’s a lot easier to do it in here. And I’m trying to be careful. I always do. So I put a tarp down on the floor and then I’m going to flip the bike over and just try to make sure I don’t damage anything. I don’t make anything dirty. I don’t get grease anywhere. So yeah, first step in this project is to flip the bike over and then remove the front wheel, remove the rear wheel, and then I’m going to swap the tires. Well, you’ve seen Planet Doug Studio many times, aka my hotel bed. Now for the very first time, you are seeing Planet Doug workshop. And I was going to say I’m very skilled at this, but of course whenever you say something like that, you’re usually setting yourself up for failure. So I should be very careful about that. But what I mean is I’m very skilled at flipping the bike over because that is step number one. And inside a hotel room, you have to be very careful because it’s very easy to lose track of where you are and you end up hitting things. But you basically make sure you grab the front wheel, otherwise it spins out of control. Grab it low down here. And then, of course, use your legs, not your back, to go down. Something else that I learned from one of my favorite books of all time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is that you always have a space where you lay things out. Like every time you remove a bolt or remove a part, you don’t just sort of toss it willy-nilly. You have an area where all of your tools and then all of the pieces that you remove get nicely lined up. So, this is my parts and tools area over there. And yeah, let’s take the rear wheel off first. But, there we go. There is my rear wheel now that I have it out. I can take a closer look at it in some a more comfortable setting. Yeah, there it burst open there. It burst open here. It burst open. That’s probably the biggest gash right there. So, let’s pop the tire off. I noticed this when I was doing this at the side of the road. These heavy-duty tires are often very difficult to get off because they’re so tight on the rim. But this thing is so old and worn out. Look at this. It just comes right off. It’s not supposed to do that. It’s not supposed to be that easy. So, let’s get the tube out. Take the tire off. Again, the tire is not supposed to come off that easily. It never does. Remove the skewer. Put it back together the way it came apart. So you remember how things work. Put it with your other tools and parts. I said these are really big tires, so getting them through the brake pads is not easy. So there we are. Ah, okay. Taking a closer look at the front tire. There’s a definite problem here. Yeah, it burst open here as well. Okay. Yeah, this one this one is toast as well obviously. So, I better patch that up. All I really need to do is ride this bike to Seremban, which is 30 km away. And if I patch this from the inside, remind me to do that. Don’t forget about that spot. Wow, that is just awful. I mean, man. Okay, this tire is done. As I mentioned earlier, I have these emergency tire boots, they’re called, and they’re like heavy duty. They’re designed basically to fix things like this, but I only have two of them left. I never expected to have so many spots that need to be repaired. I’m hoping I can cut it in half and just use half of it. But this is this is a bad one. But again, this is only a temporary fix. So yeah, I think I’m going to cut it in half and then I’ll have three halves for the other tire. I’ll use one half here. Okay, this is something that’s very odd. Right where this giant gash is. It’s right on the exact same spot as where they put the barcode, the sticker on the inside of the tire. It’s identical. Right where the tire burst open is right where that sticker is. Makes you wonder whether this kind of sticker, whether the glue weakened the rubber or something. That’s very, very strange. So, this goes on the inside. Obviously, you know, it wouldn’t do anything if you put it on the outside. This goes on the inside. All this does is it prevents the tube from bursting through the hole. That’s all this does. It’s not designed to fix the tire. It’s just for an emergency repair. All right. I think that is as good as I can manage. Covers up the whole problem area nicely. Yeah, they’re heavy wheels. My bicycle is really heavy and it starts with the wheels. Like I said, these are heavy duty rims. You can really feel it once you get the heavy duty tire on a heavy duty rim. It’s like I think most people going around the world on a bicycle probably don’t want rims or don’t want wheels quite this heavy. Now, the bigger job. I have to put all my remaining patches inside the damaged tire. In a real emergency, if you were like way out in the back country or something, you can actually just cut rubber and then you line the inside with like an old inner tube. You just cut pieces of rubber and you glue them into place. Like I said, all you’re not trying to repair the tire. All you’re trying to do is cover up the hole so that the tube on the inside doesn’t burst through the opening. So, people have used newspaper to do that. And they’ve used strips of rubber. Yeah, this is going to be a half of this one would do well there. I think that one could cover that one. And then the last that there. Oh, no. I need four pieces though. All right. I think let’s see what we can do here. Maybe I can get three out of this one piece. Not perfect, but it will get me to Seremban. I think man, I had no idea this thing was in such bad shape. Huh. This is really interesting. The worst damage right here, the biggest area is exactly where the sticker was, like the serial, the barcode that you scan for this product at the factory. That’s where the worst damage is. Why would that be? The adhesive degrading the rubber or was it having this on the inside kept the heat from the UV rays? But look at that. right where that both tires the main damage was done where the sticker was located. That is crazy. I’m so glad I’m doing this indoors and I can sit in a chair and see any other spots I didn’t notice. Just taking a look at the derailleur while I have such easy access to it. And I mean I don’t see anything obviously wrong. It does everything it’s supposed to do. It’s actually pretty complicated yet simple piece of machinery. I mean it goes in this way, right? So that moves the chain up and down the sprocket. That’s moving nicely. And then of course this goes up and down to shorten and lengthen the chain. And it moves. like it moves in so many different dimensions. It’s very it’s an incredible piece of machinery. All of that movement happens just with one cable pulling and it does all of that. It’s really quite something when you think about it. But yeah, here’s the line on the side that I never noticed before. So, I was assuming that this damage came from yesterday when the bike fell over, but it’s also possible I scraped it against a curb at some point and that’s where that line came from. Yeah, I think all I can do is put the wheels back on and go riding around the neighborhood and just keep playing around with it and maybe bend it a little bit, make some adjustments with all these little adjustment points. All right, reassembly time. Everything still looks good. Each tire has a tread, by the way. It’s supposed to rotate in a certain direction, so you have to keep that straight as well. Make sure you put everything back in the right orientation. All right. rear wheel can be a little bit trickier because you have to get it past the chain in just the right way. But it should so the big test. Everything’s running smooth. No, the brakes aren’t grinding. If that derailleur goes too far, the derailleur arm hits the spokes, well, that is complete disaster. That just tears everything apart. Anyway, that is it for now, I think. And all that I have to do now is pump up the tires again. Make sure I pump them up to a very low pressure this time, not high pressure. See if my patches hold and then carry the bike downstairs. Well, I appear to be suffering from one of two things or one of three things. Number one, it could be the universe is telling me that riding a bicycle is not for me or at least it’s not for me anymore. That could very well be what’s going on. The second thing could be that I’m just suffering from a typical cascade of failures. This happens a lot in life I found where one thing breaks and then while fixing that one thing it breaks something else and then that breaks a third item. So it could be a cascading series of failures which is just sort of what happens. Third option probably the most realistic is that oh my one poor brain cell is overloaded. I’m just such a dummy. Anyway, I put the wheels back on my bike. I pumped up the tires. I brought it downstairs and I was riding it up and down the parking lot playing around with the gears trying to figure out what’s wrong with the derailleur and I thought I was doing okay, but then I shifted one too many gears and earlier I talked about the worst thing that you could ever do by far. And it’s kind of a design flaw in a bicycle in a way. The absolute worst thing you can ever do just happened cuz my derailleur is out of alignment. So I clicked one click too far and the derailleur went right into the spokes of the wheel. Just jammed the wheel. Broke two spokes just Oh, come on. I hit the brakes so fast as soon as I heard a little click. It’s like, oh no. And it was too late. The derailleur got sucked into the spokes and it just jammed up quickly broke two spokes before I could bring the bike to a stop. So everything that I’ve done today, everything I did was so that I could ride my bicycle to Seremban tomorrow and just buy new tires. But now I think that plan is pretty much out the window because yeah, once you break a couple of spokes in your wheel, it weakens the whole wheel, right? The whole thing loses tension. It’s not like normal construction where you have, I don’t know, 36 posts holding something up and you break two of them. Well, you still have 34 posts holding it up, right? You lose a little bit of strength, but it still works. Wheels aren’t like that. Wheels rely on these thin pieces of steel being properly tensioned, and that gives the wheel its strength. You break two spokes, the wheel loses all of its strength. So, I mean, I could still ride it. People ride bicycles quite long distances with broken spokes, but what you’re doing is bending the rim the entire time. And yeah, you’re just basically knocking the entire wheel out of true, weakening it, and you could end up just collapsing the entire wheel. So anyway, with a rim like this, my bike, I can’t ride it at all now. It’s basically unridable. So everything I did today was supposed to allow me to ride my bike to Seremban tomorrow and now I can’t do that anymore. So but I can still get something done. What I’m going to do now is I brought the bike back up to my room because why not? I have to do more work on it. And yeah, here’s the base of this spoke. So, it broke that spoke and it broke this one here. I’ve already removed them, but they’re still attached down near the hub. And they broke in the absolute worst place. If they broke on this side, I could probably replace them pretty easily, pretty well. But they broke on the drive side. right here where the cassette attaches. That’s the drive side of the wheel. That is where the two spokes broke. There’s one of them right there. You can see there’s a little bit of a spoke left and the other one has been wrapped up around the hub. So, in order to replace these spokes, you have to remove the entire cassette. And I can do that. I actually have the tools to do that. But now that you’re talking about removing the cassette, re-trueing the rear wheel, to be honest, you really should get the experts to do that rather than attempting it yourself. You can do it. I could do it in an emergency. But what I’m going to do is take the wheels off the bike and just bring the wheels to Seremban by train. I think what I’m going to do is bring my rear wheel in. Maybe that’s all I need. I don’t need to bring the front wheel. I’ll bring the rear wheel, bring it to a good bike shop, have them fix the broken spokes, and also buy new tires, then come back. And then I should be able to ride. And eventually I’ll come to a bicycle store and I can get them to look at my derailleur. I think that’s what I’m going to have to do. Yeah. You know, I could not believe it when it happened. Just so dumb. I should have been so much more careful, but I was feeling overconfident. Things seem to be working okay. And then I just clicked the gear lever. I pushed it a little bit too far right into the spokes. Crack. Crack, crack, crack. Broke two spokes. So anyway, I think I’m going to call it a day here. End the video here because yeah, nothing much else is going to happen today. I’m going to go out and get something to eat. But yeah, I need to take a break. I need to relax. So I’m going to shut down the video here. The entire video will be about my failed attempt to fix my bicycle. a lot of work, but ended up being completely pointless. I didn’t have to do any of this work if I knew that in the future I was going to break spokes. So, that is absolutely it. Shutting down for now. Thanks for hanging out with me. If you stuck with this video all the way to the end, congratulations. That makes you a member of the Planet Doug Crunch Club. You know who you are. If you made it this far and you’re in the crunch club, put CC in the comments to let me know. That’s always good encouragement for me that you made it all the way to the end of one of my giant videos. And as always, if you feel like supporting the Planet Doug channel and the current Planet Doug journey across Malaysia, I have a Patreon account. You can go sign up there, check that place out. So that’s it. shutting down. And hopefully next time I see you, I guess I’ll record a video while I go into Seremban. Why not? Why not, right? I’ll continue documenting this epic adventure. So, the next video will be about me taking a KTM train tomorrow morning to Seremban and seeing if I can get somebody to fix my beloved wheel. And today I was going on and on and on about my wheels being indestructible, the most durable, toughest touring rim in the world. And then the next thing you know, maybe that was then maybe that’s because I said that that’s why I’m being punished with broken spokes is so ironic. Anyway, off I go to Seremban tomorrow and wish me luck on that trip.