Comments on: Get Ready For Your Tubeless Tire Experience

By: mg

mg — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:55:58 +0000

You know exactly where I’m at on this one — tubeless is where it’s at, hands down. From all performance perspectives that matter on the trail — traction, rolling resistance, flat resistance (especially to pinch flats), the ability of the tire to have a more supple feel, with an ability to run reduced air pressures — tubeless dominates over tubed every day. The only time it doesn’t is perhaps in the shop, upon initial installation, if you aren’t lucky. If all goes well however, it’s all good in the ‘hood. Lately for me, the latter has been the case more often than not, even when running tires/rims not specifically designed to be run tubeless (ie., running ‘getto tubeless’).

Different widths and applications for tubeless exist today, and have for years. It’s called converting tires. There’s a pretty good brain trust of reliable tubeless conversion candidates out there. You just have to know who to ask. For example, for commuting, I’ve been running the Schwalbe Marathon Cross wire bead 700×38 tubeless, the front for more than six months totally reliably now — finished 5th at the Dirty Kanza 200 on them actually. I had to pull the rear tire off after the ‘Kanza because I ripped it up on the Kansas flint rocks and didn’t want to have it fail on me somewhere. I’ve been running a WTB InterWolf 700×38c wire bead getto tubeless, believe it or not, 100-percent reliably since the Kanza, so for about a month and a half. It’s working great and is lighter than the Schwalbe. It rolls nice and fast. Too bad WTB quit making them. It’s basically a 38c version of the Vulpine 29er tire tread pattern. Works good tubeless, especially on the rear. But I digress…

Have a good night.

By: Brian Pierro

Brian Pierro — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:19:49 +0000

Stans road tubeless conversion works great! Im not sure why more people dont use it. I have ever since they debuted it at last years interbike and its fantastic. Especially on a full aluminum roadbike it really smooths out the road.

Now they just need to make more tires available. I know they are coming Hutchinson says. Different widths and designs for more applications like commuting, etc.

By: marc b

marc b — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:21:05 +0000

GT- nice post. I have to agree that “Tire and rim manufacturers are working closely with each other, guaranteeing that the tire bead/rim interface” is critical for tubeless tires to work well. In my experience, most folks who claim that tubeless tires are ‘crap’ are the folks running half-assed conversions in the name of cost- or weight-savings. On can’t pick and choose only parts of a system and expect the result to work as one. Along these lines, as popular as their products are with the racers out there, I feel that Stans has done as much harm to tubeless’ acceptance as good by selling rims & ideas that haven’t always been ready for prime time. Their method of ’sealing’ a non-tubeless Small Block 8? Use pints (quarts?) of sealant in the tire, let it set up a bit, then dump most of it out. I can’t tell you how many folks I’ve come across at races who (when asked how things went) report flatting out of competition on ‘converted’ tires and/or ‘ghetto strips’ (the bellies of undersized inner tubes). Of course, their rims have come a long way since the blowout days (of 2 years ago), but I’m a bit leery of bike companies that use customers as beta testers- that went out of fashion in the late 1990s.

I truly believe in tubeless tires: I haven’t had a tubed flat on my own bike in over a year (not bad for thousands of miles in the desert), but have thrown $30 worth of tubes away in a weekend on tubed test bikes I’ve been sent. Even if tubeless tires are slightly heavier, their performance benefits are great (traction, comfort, etc) and they’ll always be faster than a flat tubed tire.

Given my off-road experience, I’d love to try a strong tubeless road tire (think Maxxis Re-Fuse or Conti GP 4 Season) for riding, racing and commuting- though it is hard to go wrong with a bit of Stans squirted into a Conti tube. I’ll be right there in line when my favorite 29er tires are available in a tubeless casing, too.

marc

By: Quinn

Quinn — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:27:01 +0000

Talking about Road- I wonder how well the Stans kit works?

Mountain- I know that I am going to have to get new 29er tires and I am really leaning toward tubless.

By: Guitar Ted

Guitar Ted — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:27:12 +0000

mike: Nope, I didn’t, but I spent a lot of time with the Hutchinson folks on two different occaisions talking about the concept and having demonstrations done for me. I have also researched some with Shimano about the concept as well as speaking a bit about it with the folks from Stan’s NoTubes. I think when it gets out amongst the public we will get some positive takes on it, but time will tell.

By: mike

mike — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 02:21:18 +0000

Did you actually test road tubeless?