Sorry for the long post, but here's abit of background before I get to the meat of the post....

During the Spring Swap Meet, we did a tech session on tire repair in the field.  We experiemented with 2 cheap kits and a high end kit donated by ARB.  We unanimously decided that the ARB kit was the superior product, and that it worked really well for repairing regular tire punctures.  After a bit of experimentation we decided that neither kit would work for a reliable sidewall repair.

During our Bill Burke training last summer, Bill recommended either the ARB repair kit or the Safety Seal kit.  He carries a Safety Seal kit himself, but Safety Seal never replied to my requrest for a kit to use during our tech session so I now recommend the ARB kit because they are cooler and you can get them from Columbia Rovers.    Hey, if there is nothing else separating them, we might as well pick the product that is well supported by those that show us support.

Bill recently posted on his facebook page that he made sidewall repair using 5 carefully placed plugs.  He ran 2 more days of trail and drove home on it (but doesn't recommend that you do)  I don't think there is anything magical about the Safety Seal kit, but it does appear that Bills technique is a bit more refined than what we did during our tech session.  Looks like we need to practice a bit more.

In all fairness to our sidewall test, we did use the cheap plugs not the ARB ones.

Unlike the ARB/SafetySeal plugs, the cheap ones require the vulcanizing/adhesive compound to be added to the plugs (which we did not do on the sidewall test IIRC) and I think you need to allow adequate curing time before inflation.

I think we could have made it work though -- our sidewall injury was no larger than what Bill shows and was undoubtedly a cleaner cut...