Princess_Allez

Tubeless should be thought of in the same manner as a car or motorcycle tire: either the sealant works, you plug the tire, or neither works and you catch a lift home.

bruce19

What does this mean? What is it about the wheel/tire combination?

alo

People say if you run tubeless, and have a flat while out on the road, you can always put a tube in.

If you read the OPs earlier comments, with that wheel/tire combination, it is very difficult to put a tire on with a tube in.

bruce19

Thank you.

Rides4Beer

Love tubeless on the gravel bike, but that's so I can run low pressures offroad. I've seen too many people have issues with tubeless on the road for it to be appealing to me.

I run 28mm GP5000s with latex tubes and the ride is fantastic.

alo

I have begun running my fat bike, with tubeless sealer in the tubes. If it is in the tubes, it is much less mess when you repair or change a tire. I have not had a flat tire yet, but it has not been long.

MinnMan

Impossibly tight. Cannot mount when a tube is inserted.

holybinch

following this (and other, related topics) with attention.
i've owned 2-way zondas for ages, and never felt the need to move to TL.
With carbon shoes arriving soon(ish) i'm debating jumping on the bandwagon, but scare stories are plenty, and, well, why change something that's not broken...

WhyFi

This is like confirmation bias on steroids. As a non-user, and by its very nature, you'll only notice tubeless when it doesn't work for someone else - it's like taking a survey but only accepting the negative results.

I can guarantee you that 90% of the guys that I ride with don't know that I run tubeless and have been for longer than the three years that I've been riding with them. I've never had a flat while with them, but I know that I've taken punctures in their presence. Despite that, if I should take a Goldilocks puncture and go flat the next time I'm out with them, whenever that is, it'll automatically be an indictment against tubeless in their minds, because it'll be their only data point (as the successes went unnoticed).

The other thing with road tubeless, in particular, is that it's still relatively new, not all sealants seem to be appropriate for road pressure and user experience/skillset is... varied, to put it gently. Is a certain rim/tire combination really impossibly tight, or is it just that the person installing them was not yet practiced enough to do all of the little things to ease the process? Does sealant in general not work above a certain pressure or was the person using stuff better suited for MTBs?

This is why I think that it's important to talk about rates of punctures, before and after the move to tubeless, and the specifics of actual user experiences, rather than to lean on observations of failure or, even worse, parrot third-hand "experience" from those online or friends-of-friends.

WhyFi

If it's not broken for you, then don't.

Cypress

Why carbon when nylon wasn't broken?

holybinch

Absolutely, it was implied that the observation was only relevant from my perspective.
Which might shift as soon as I'm allowed to ride outside, since I've moved to a new country (Poland) this winter and haven't taken the road bike out around here yet. And the roads are much rougher here that back in Switzerland
Hence, my p-rate might increase and I might need to revisit this.

I also ofully agree with your point on confirmation bias, and it's also why i'm still considering moving to TL, despite the aforemention scare-stories :|

holybinch

Well there are improvements to be had, and although I know that TL brings some improvements, those are not as clear cut in regards to the downsides I read about.
Hence, more education required.

Cypress

A lot of people (like me) aren't seeing any downsides to TL. I run GP5KTL's on Giant SLR-1 wheels and had no problem mounting them. Putting a tube in them in the field won't be a problem, and so far, I haven't needed to. I've got 2500 miles on my tubeless setup and not a single flat or issue.

Maybe I'm due for something catastrophic

eduskator

I opted for tubeless last year and didn't get any flat so far (used to get 1 per month on my previous bike...). One thing's for sure though, if I get one, I'll need to call the girlfriend so she can pick me up because I don't carry any tools and even less a CO2 tire inflator. It's a risk I take. I live dangerously, I know.

holybinch

Talk about tempting fate

I probably just need to get on with it, and get my own N+1 observation.

As I said, I make it about education - people tend to have very clear cut views on the topic, and reading both sides of the arguments is interesting

noodle soup

I tried it 2011 and was thoroughly unimpressed. The ride was nice, but back then I was using 23mm tires @110psi on Stans Alpha 340 hoops(and Stans sealant). Wire/thorn punctures sealed nicely, but anything larger would send sealant spraying all over the place.

Now I'm using 30mm tires on 23mm internal width hoops @60/55psi. The ride is wast and smoooooth.

Rides4Beer

You missed the first part, I've been running tubeless on the gravel bike since I got it last summer, so I'm familiar. And on the gravel bike, it's fantastic, I've never had an issue.

Some might say you have confirmation bias, you've never had an issue, so it's great. Yes, the issues I've seen could be a due to sealant/tire combos, user error, etc., but it's enough that I don't want to mess with it.

The common answer of "well you can just throw a tube in it if you need to" is also a non-starter for me. Having removed tires and cleaned out sealant, that is something I would never want to deal with on the roadside. I've also seen people struggle with certain rim/clincher combos on the roadside, also something I wouldn't deal with. I ride mostly solo (even before the current situation), so if I can't fix it easily on the roadside by myself, then I wouldn't use it.

I rarely get a flat, so for the hassles of tubeless on the road, I don't see the benefit over my current GP5K/latex combo. My new road bike came setup tubeless, and the first thing I did was remove the stock tubeless tires and put a set of GP5K clinchers on. As always, ride what you want, and stay safe.

holybinch

The whole tape/sealant/tyre/rim/valve combo puzzle is an interesting one to navigate it seems

WhyFi

You can't imply that road tubeless is different that gravel tubeless while simultaneously claiming familiarity with road tubeless because of gravel tubeless.

You don't seem to know what confirmation bias is. Besides that, you've missed the multiple instances in which I've said that it's tubeless isn't for everyone, that it's not a free lunch and that my learning curve has been defined by my failures with stuff like maintenance intervals.

IF you had experience, you would know that this is *such* a rare thing if you do the other stuff right. Also, IF you had sufficient experience fitting various tubeless tires, you wouldn't fear addressing it on the side of the road.

That's great and I wouldn't recommend tubeless to you or others like you. What I take issue with is someone regurgitating that it's too much of a hassle when they have zero practical experience.

FlashBazbo

Also, if you've got hookless rims on your tubeless wheels, they will not accept tubes. You're stuck unless you can plug the hole on the side of the road.

noodle soup

You can use tubes with hookless hoops, but you must still use tubeless tires.

Cypress

It's not as bad as it seems. Your rims still need tape if you're running tubes, so that's already taken care of. Going from bare rim to ready to rock is as easy as tape, install valve, mount tire, add sealant, inflate.

If a tubeless tire gets a flat in the field that can't be plugged by sealant or a tire plug (95% of flats are covered by those two), all that needs to happen is to dismount one side of the tire (just like with a tube), unscrew/remove the tubeless valve, dump the sealant, boot the hole, and install a tube just the same as a non-tubeless setup. If a hole is big enough that a tire plug can't solve the issue, the tire goes in the garbage as soon as I limp home. I wouldn't run a tubed tire with a hole that big either, but I might be picker than most when it comes to acceptable tire damage.

big john

It's the rim that makes it difficult to mount the tire. Some tires are harder than others but rims that don't have a low "valley" in the center don't have a place for the tire to go to relieve the effective diameter. I don't see how having a tube in there could have an effect on it, the tube will get out of the way.

MinnMan

First part is true. The Mavic UST rims have a very shallow valley.

Second part is empirically true - the difference between fitting the Yksion tires on the UST rims, with and without a tube, is night and day. It seems that the tolerances are just so tight that the little bit of interference of the tube doesn't allow the tire bead enough space to lengthen that apparent radius.

If anybody out there using the UST rims and Yksion wheels has a different experience, I'd be interested to hear.