Time to Catch up!
It has been a while, but I have good excuses!
Sunday morning, I was concerned about my wheels with such low tension...I knew that I would have to make some changes in the near future to allow time for them to be repaired. I began communication with 2-old to set up delivery of the wheels to their maker for another dose of love. He of course said, "why don't you just dome to StL today and we can ride?"
Moments later the family was loaded in the van and headed to St. Louis (seems that they had some needs there also).
After a full day of riding and frolicking around Castlewood, we returned to 2-olds house to dismount my wheels and tires. This was a neat experience. The Stans rims hold the tires a little like a car wheel does (force is needed to unseat the beads on both sides). This is very cool (it works as advertised). Another neat discovery was the pearl I found inside my rear tire.
I have read that a person should not use CO2 to inflate their Stans-fortified tires. I never knew why, and had done it so many times without incident that I once topped off my rear wheel (about a week ago) with CO2 shortly after mounting it tubeless with Stans. Well, the reason why you should not use CO2 is now apparent, it activates the latex to harden and form pearls. You can probably imagine a few reasons why this would be undesirable.
So, after we dismounted the tires, we loaded the kids backup and drove back home. They were worn out from their visit to the Zoo with their (probably favorite) aunt. Man they did a lot in a few hours!
Once home, I had to scramble to unload the van, and convert my truck over to an art hauling machine. This means that all the bike stuff must come out and the bed cover must go on, etc.
At 5:30 AM the next morning we were off to Poplar Bluff to pick up a bunch of artwork (a little side business that I help out in). Man, that is one SERIOUSLY draining drive. Curvy winding roads with no shoulders...I was cashed last night.
So that gets us us to today. I am back to pseudo-normal. No ride last night, but there should be a nice group attending tonight. Probably will not be much training going on, but it should be a lot of fun!
I still don't get
I still don't get the one in the front tire though. You didn't hit that one with CO2, and it was stuck to the sidewall like it had grown there from a seed crystal or something.
Strange goings on there man.
Does this happen with any of the other sealants out there?
from my musings...
I typed up a piece on sealants that I may post up sometime.
As I understand things, Stans is a brew of chemicals that is relatively stable in a tire, but becomes unstable when it leaks out to the atmosphere (resulting in sealing the hole). This instability makes the stuff work, but can (and will) result in premature hardening of the sealant inside the tire. There are some known triggers that can cause this premature hardening to occur. Some people (including NoTubes.com) claim that CO2 inflators do it...I am not in a position to argue that, but I have seen it happen in the absence of CO2 also (in automotive and MX tires, and my bike tires).
I suspect that either rapid pressure or temperature changes will cause this slow reaction to speed up (yes, I said “slow” because the stuff is hardening/drying up from the day you put it in). A CO2 inflator will cause both a rapid temperature and pressure change...perhaps that is the mechanism?
That said, the pearl in the other tire may have resulted from a contaminant in the tire that triggered it...I don't know.
Other sealants? I will post on that some other time, but basically, I think that anything with a latex base could do it.