Tubeless Shenanigans: do I give up? #tubeless #tubelesstyres #cyclingtours #bicyclemaintenancebasics

5MV-TL17 – Tubeless Shenanigans: I give up?
————————————–
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/fiveminutevelo
In this video I take a (final) look at my attempts to get tubeless road and gravel tyres (tires) to work for me. I describe my final attempts and some earlier experiences to make my conclusion. I failed and I have finally decided to give-up trying to make them work. here is a playlist of my previous ‘experiments’:

If you know what I am doing wrong, let me know what it/they is/are in the comments section.

==========================

About the 5MV channel
————————————–
My name is Terry and I love cycling. I have named my channel “Five Minute Velo” (5MV). I have called it 5MV because the videos I upload will (mostly) last no longer than five minutes. Each video will cover just one subject that is described in the title. Although the channel is mainly about cycling on the road, I will also cover some light (gravel) off road riding, cycle touring and ebiking. No matter what, much of the advice will be pertinent to many branches of the sport/pastime.

I welcome constructive comments that will help me improve the videos that I produce and upload.

There may be some dry humor in some of the videos, so dry it may not always be obvious :-).

====================

My strava profile can be found here:
https://www.strava.com/athletes/7723982

Cambridge Cycling Club website:
http://www.cambridge-cycling-club.org.uk/

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/fiveminutevelo/

Photos of 2019 Tour of low countries:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/3ierczDfurM1gTGi7

Random cycling photos (will be updated from time to time):
https://photos.app.goo.gl/VZBhCWcQZtynsJF1A

====================

Terry

Okay, I admit it. I am an addict. But what am I addicted to? I’m addicted to tubeless tires. That’s a good thing many of you may think, but in my case, it really isn’t. I’m not simply addicted to tubeless tires. That would be quite easy. I’m addicted to trying to get them to work reliably for me. I’ve actually been trying to get tubeless tires to work since 2017. Between then and now, 2025, I’ve tried several times. And although I’ve had some successes, I’ve had a lot of failures, too. In the top right hand corner of the screen is a link to a playlist of my tubeless failures. And if any of you watch those, hopefully you can tell me what I’ve been doing wrong. In this video, I’ll be telling you about my latest tubeless debacle, what I did, what happened, and the conclusion I came to. Although you’ve probably judged from my general demeanor, it didn’t go well. Over the years, I’ve tried tubeless on three different bikes using four different sets of wheels. four different sets of tires, three of which were tubeless specific and using three different tubeless sealants. More recently, and I’ll talk about that later, I’ve had a more positive experience. Of the 16 different combinations of wheel and tire that I’ve used, just five have worked well enough for me to have the confidence in them to take them out on the road. And some combinations, even when I can get them to seal and inflate, the sealant doesn’t work well enough out on the road, as you will see later in this video for me to rely upon them. In my latest set of tubeless trials, I’ve been using this bike. It’s a Giant Road E+ from 2016, and I’m using the stock wheels, which are tubeless ready. I shodd the wheels with these tubeless ready Maxis Ramblers. I had previously been using these tires with tubes and I knew that the front one had some small holes in it. I had some of this stand’s no tube sealant left over from previous unsuccessful tests on high-pressure road tires. As I was now going to be using lower pressures in these gravel tires, I thought it would be worth trying. What I’m going to do next is swish the sealant around inside the tire, making sure the inside of the tire is fully coated. And then I’m going to pump it back up. I left this tire overnight. And 16 hours later, the pressure has dropped from 50 PSI, the starting pressure, to currently 12 psi. Okay, I’ve just pumped the tire up to 40 PSI, and I’ve inspected it. But that tiny hole, probably less than half a millimeter long, is still leaking. Right, I think I’ll run this tire for a little bit. Um, because it does stay up for several hours. After a few days, the rate of air loss seemed to have reduced, but it hadn’t stopped completely. If the sealant wouldn’t close that tiny hole, what chance would it have with a larger one? This was basically the same result as I had with the narrower, higher pressure tires. I’ve just removed the old stands no tubes tire sealant from this Maxis Rambler tire and I’ve replaced it with this PT’s biofiber tubeless sealant. Interesting stuff because it appears to have glitter in. Anyway, I’ve put this in the tire and I’ve pumped it up and then I looked around the tire to see if I could find any holes and I did. I found this one hole here. It is still slowly leaking as you can see by the bubbles forming. That’s after putting that hole at the bottom of the tire for around four or 5 minutes and it’s still leaking. So, um I will have a look see if I can find any other holes and then I’ll put that back at the bottom of the tire and see whether it seals up overnight. There’s a tiny hole just here and that’s also leaking. So, the tubeless sealant hasn’t sealed that. I’ve looked around the rest of this tire and I can’t see any signs of sealant coming out anywhere else. That is a very slow leak, although it is still leaking. I’ll put that at the bottom of the tire so that the sealant pools over the top of the hole and see how it is in about 12 hours. Okay, I’ve left this tire overnight with the sealant in it and the holes which were around here were at the bottom of the wheel. So, the sealant should have pulled into those holes. And it looks as though they have actually sealed. I think the tire pressure’s gone down a little bit, but so far it’s looking good. So, I’ll take it for a ride. And although the tire stayed up reasonably well overnight, when I started riding it, the seal’s broken down and it started leaking again. Now, this is a tiny hole, far too small to put one of those licorice worms in. So, basically, it’s a tubeless sealant failure. I think I’m going to take this out and put an ordinary TPU tube in. This is the ride now TPU tube that I’m going to put in this tire to replace that tubeless sealant. It looks like almost all of the sealant has been lost. Part of the problem here is when you do have to put a tube in with tubeless tires, it’s a real mess having to clean out the sealant. And even when you have cleaned the tire up and put the new tube in, you still end up with quite a mess. And I’m just about to go out for a ride on this bike. It’s a Giant Road E+ from 2022 and it’s fitted with tubeless tires. They are Maxis Refuse 700 by 32C and they’re tubeless ready and they’re set up as tubeless. I’ve just put 50 PSI in the front tire and 60 PSI in the rear tire. I took that lone bike out on two rides covering a total of 160 kilometers. And despite going down some fairly rough roads, I didn’t have any problems with the tires. That was quite a positive tubeless experience. I then decided to measure the pressure loss in the tires and this is what I found. It’s now 22 hours later and the front tire has dropped from 50 PSI down to 46 PSI. So, a 4 PSI loss. That’s actually not too bad. I don’t think the rear tire has dropped from 60 PSI down to 43 PSI over 22 hours. I think that’s quite a substantial amount. The wheels and tires on this bike had been used for quite a while and hence they had reached some sort of equilibrium and therefore the pressure loss was probably not unusual. Although I didn’t get chance to test whether a puncture would seal, the wheels and tires did behave flawlessly. Although that pressure loss in the rear tire does take the shine off of that tubeless setup. Unfortunately, not all of my experiences of road tubeless tires have been quite so positive. I won’t go through the different experiences here. I have documented those before and there’s a link to one or two of those above. The bottom line is my experience suggests that the tubeless sealant works fine up to about 30 PSI, but beyond that on road tires, the sealant just breaks down under the pressure. That’s probably why tubeless works well on mountain bikes and large gravel tires where the pressure isn’t so high. Am I now cured of my addiction of getting tubeless tires to work? I think on the whole, yes. Although, there is one exception to that, and I’ll talk about that at the end of this video. But for now, I’m going to give up with tubeless tires and go back to using TPU tubes. Now, I know TPU tubes aren’t perfect. They have many drawbacks and I’ll talk about my experience of using TPU tubes, both the good and the bad, in a future video. So, for me, the pivotal event that caused me to switch back to tubes was that time when I was next to the side of the road cleaning tubeless sealant out of the tire and I thought, what am I doing? Is it all worth it? And at that point, I thought, no, it’s not. So, that’s one of the reasons I’m going back to TPU tubes. However, it’s not the only reason, and I have covered some of those reasons in previous videos, and I’ll just do a quick summary of those. Now, in an earlier video, I determined that the weight of a conventional tire with TPU tube can be lower than for a tubeless setup. The weight difference isn’t much, a few tens of grams. And for me, that really doesn’t matter. However, for you, if you’re a weight weenie, it might do. But for me, the bottom line is that wasn’t factored into my decision. The cost of TPU tubes has fallen substantially and now they don’t cost any more than the conventional tube. This means the cost of setting up a tube tire can be substantially less than the tubeless tire. Particularly if you’re one of those people that has to take their bike to a bike shop in order to get the tubeless tire set up. For me, the extra cost of tubeless tires was only a minor factoring why I abandoned them. I can install or change a TPU tube within a few minutes. I can’t say the same for tubeless tires. I have spent many, many hours in the workshop trying to get them to work. For me, this was a major issue and it was part of the reason I’ve changed back. Of course, you can avoid that by taking your bike to a bike shop. However, I’m a home mechanic and I want to stay that way. I don’t get that many punctures because I take steps to reduce their likelihood and if I do have a puncture, I’m skilled at repairing the tube or replacing it. So, on the whole, having a puncture for me is not too much of a problem. I must admit there have been times when punctures have been very inconvenient or even uncomfortable, but those times are rare. I do recognize there are people out there that hate punctures and they’ll do almost anything to avoid them. And for that reason, I can understand why the promise of tubeless tires can be alluring. Which brings me on to the next section about reliability. On many occasions when I’ve had a foreign object puncture a TPU tube, I find that the tube sort of semi seals around the object and the tire can take quite a time to deflate. Sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes over many hours. This means I don’t always have to stop for a punctured TPU tube. I can leave it until I get home in order to repair it. Some tubeless sealants claim to be able to seal small holes or even larger cuts. I can’t say that a tubeless setup will never seal a small hole. After all, I could have been there when many tubeless punctures selfsealed. I just didn’t notice them because they were unremarkable. But in my personal experience, if it does seal the hole, it won’t retain high pressure. Also, in my own experience, larger cuts will not seal without using a plug. And even then, when they’re plugged, they have the same problem as with smaller holes. Plus, the time taken to fit a plug is often greater than it would take to change a tube. Fitting that plug may well just destroy the tire, too, which increases the inconvenience and the cost. Finally, if you find yourself in the situation where you have a puncture that you can’t repair and you have to put a tube in, that can get very messy and it can be timeconsuming. Now, I think there are situations where tubeless tires can be troublefree and reliable, but that’s in a particular set of circumstances which I hope to cover in a future video. But in the meantime, if you think I’m wrong and you can tell me why, let me know what I’m doing wrong in the comment section. In my experience, a tire setup as tubeless is no more reliable than the same tire with a TPU tube in it. However, during setup and when things go wrong out on the road, tubeless tires can be a lot more hassle. This lack of reliability coupled with the inconvenience is the main reason I’ve stopped trying to get tubeless tires to work for me. Over the years where I’ve been trying to get tubeless tire technology to work on my road bikes and on gravel bikes, the underlying technology has stayed basically the same. And as I think many of my failures relate to that underlying technology, I shouldn’t have really expected any improvement. So that’s part of the reason I’ve given up on tubeless tire technology as it is now. I don’t think the technology is quite there for road and to some extent gravel tires. However, I do reserve the right to go back to tubeless tie technology in the future should there be a sufficiently large technological breakthrough that would allow the sealant to work better. But until then, I’m going to carry on using TPU tubes. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up. And even if you didn’t enjoy it, maybe give it a thumbs up. If you want to hear more videos like this, then consider subscribing, too. And even if you don’t want to hear more videos like this, subscribe as well. That way, at least I’ll pop up in your feed and you’ll know not to watch. Anyway, that’s the end of my tubeless rant. Maybe there’ll be another one in the future from me. Until that future video, it’s goodbye.