It seems like every 5 minutes there is a new product guaranteed to make your bicycle riding experience better.
In 2001 a man named Stan Koziatek got sick of getting flat tires while mountain biking. Stan came up with, and marketed the thing that today we call “Tubeless”.
Stan’s NoTubes, and Orange Seal products have been the sealants used at the bike shop. These two products use different ingredients in their tubeless sauces. Orange Seal says they put Nanites in their sealant. Wikipedia says Nanites are microscopic electronic robots. I think Orange Seal really use tiny bits of glitter like they do in Stan’s, but It would be awesome to have flat sealing robots in your tires though.
The reason to go “Tubeless” is multi faceted. Without tubes you have less spinning weight, meaning easier and faster acceleration. Without tubes, we can run lower inflation pressure which gives us a bigger contact patch with Mother Earth, and no pinch flats. But beware. If you go too low in the PSI department you might burp a tire off of the rim. The last “Tubeless” advantage is that small punctures from thorns, sticks, glass, and their evil metallic friends will not cause a flat and stop your ride. Thanks Stan.
Finish Line Technologies Inc. just upped the tubeless tire sealant ante. The Finish Line Tubeless Tire Sealant bottle claims that it will not dry out ( Stans’s and Orange Seal do. ) and it will last for the life of the tire! On the back of the bottle they tell us it is Latex free, cleans up with water, likes CO2, is good down to -10º Fahrenheit, it’s Hypoallergenic, non-toxic and will seal punctures up to 1/4 inch. It also contains Propylene Glycol and FiberLink™ technology with DuPont Kevlar®. Bicycle tires need only apply, automobile tires are excluded. It’s not for human consumption even though it is non-toxic, and looks a lot like poppyseed salad dressing. Keep it out of the reach of children.
I bought some of this new Finish Line Tubeless Tire Sealant to replace the vintage sealant that dried out in the tires of my second hand Giant XTC Advanced SS mountain bike. I dismounted, and washed out all of the old sealant in the tires. Then every millimeter of the rims were cleaned of the previous riders Orange Seal residue and then wiped with Isopropyl Alcohol. While I was rinsing out the tires and peeling the old Orange Seal sealant off of the inside of the tire and the bead, it started me thinking. If I can’t get all of this old sealant out of, or off of the tire, will this be an issue? Should I buy new tires for this experiment?
In a frenzy I called Finish Line Technologies Inc. The word is that you can reuse a tire that had been molested by another tubeless tire sealant as long as there is no wet residue. Even so, I went crazy and re-cleaned every bit of dried latex off of the tire beads to make sure there would be no excuses. Two layers of fresh WTB tubeless rim tape was lovingly wrapped around the clean rims, and crowned with some new Problem Solvers Big P-Nuts. The Big P-Nuts stems have a tapered rubber base and a flower like nut that you can tighten and loosen without tools. They seal the hole in a double wall rim better than the flat bottomed valves I had removed.
The WTB Trail Boss 3.0 tires frighteningly snapped, crackled and popped their beads onto the carbon rims. After I changed my shorts, 5 oz. of Finish Line Tubeless Tire Sealant flowed into each wheel through the core-less valve stem. The reason I went with 5 oz. of sealant instead of 4 oz. as suggested on the back of the bottles is that we are dealing with 650b x 3” tires. 4 oz of sealant might have worked, but I didn’t want to take a chance it wouldn’t. Valves cores were reinstalled along with 30psi of air. Crazy shaking, spinning, and rolling ensued in an effort to get the Finish Line Tubeless Tire Sealant where it needed to be. No leaks or weeping was seen. The wheels found their way back onto my Giant XTC and it scooted back and forth on the street to seal the deal.
While I was waiting for the mountain bike riding weather to improve, I decided to see if the Finish Line Tubeless Sealant really works on small punctures.
I found an old tubeless rim and a discarded 29er tire for the experiment.
After taping and seating, 4oz. of Finish Line Tubeless Sealant was added along with 30 psi of air, and then swished around to coat everything. A poker was viciously stuck into and wiggled around the tire. When it was removed air came out of the puncture. The tire was spun and when the hole came back to the top, a bit of sealant had come thru and the little FiberLink™ Kevlar bits plugged the hole. The tire sat in the garage with its wound up at 12 o’clock overnight. The next morning she still held air. Later, the tire was stabbed again and then shot with a staple gun and still held over 20 psi. The coup de gras was a 1/4 inch sidewall stab with a really sharp knife. This savagery made it hard for the Finish Line Tubeless Sealant to quickly seal the tire, but it did. If I pumped 30 psi into the tire, the cut would leak until it got down to around 17 psi. My guess is that the sidewall cut was so smooth and large, that the FiberLink™ bits didn’t have much texture to catch and hold onto with the tire at that high a pressure. The good news is that on the trail, I would not have had to walk home.
Later that day I pumped the tire to 20 psi and left it sitting in the garage. After a couple of weeks with it’s wounds at 12 o’clock position, the tire was still holding 17psi of air. Periodically I would spin the tire to redistribute the sealant. There is some sealant weeping around the wounds but no air leaking. A few days ago, I wanted to see if it would leak if I again pumped it up to 30 psi. It didn’t. I just went out to the garage and found 26.5 psi still in the tire! Them little FiberLink™ Kevlar® bits must have gotten together and sealed the deal.
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