Two Wheel Blogs

A while back I reported on Stan's tubeless system conversion (and home brew tubeless) on my 29er (Here).

Well, I wanted to get back to you guys and let you know some more about how it is working (still). Recently on a ride, I discovered that I once again had been lax on my maintenance and allowed the front tire to go dangerously low on sealant. I decided to ride anyway with surprisingly good results.

I was riding very hard and ended up crashing pretty hard after doing a wheelie drop off of a pretty large log onto flat. I landed with the front wheel offline and the correction was one of those where the tire hooked up better than it should have and actually rolled the tire off the rim instead of breaking traction. Anyway, the picture clearly shows the tire with a bunch of detritus pinched between the bead and rim. The amazing thing is it sealed up perfectly, and I finished the ride (3 miles back to the truck).

When I returned home and cleaned out the debris, I discovered that the leaves and sticks were partially inside the tire. This indicated that the tire had rolled WELL off the bead, allowed the jungle in, then popped back and sealed up. All this and it only lost a few P.S.I.

What I am not telling you is, I crashed earlier in the ride (yeah it was a bad day) and rolled this tire off resulting in a totally flat tire. I then hit the tire with a CO2 shot and continued on. Those are pretty strong words there...simply air the tire up and ride on...no patch kit, no replaced tube, no quick release or wrench, no tire levers, just blow in air and ride....it sealed up and off I went.

In summary, these are mixed results for tubeless I suppose. I like to think they are more positive than negative. I mean really, if the tire had not rolled off the bead seal, I would have crashed anyway, and might have bent the wheel if the tire had not given (there has got to be a weak link somewhere and I would rather it be an easily repairable one). Yeah, I had a flat, but it took about 3 seconds to fix it after I got my inflator out of the pack.

I am still not saying it is for everyone, but so far it definitely seems to be for me.