Wednesday, 12 May 2021
Simple KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) First attempt!
Sunday, 2 May 2021
Simply Tubeless! A basic instruction guide to running standard tyres and rims tubeless.
How Do All.
I have been running some of my bike wheels tubeless for about 5 or 6 years now and with great results on the whole.
I have run tubeless specific tyres on standard and tubeless ready rims, and also standard tyres on standard and tubeless ready rims.
I have used several tubeless sealants, Stans No Tubes sealant, Joe's Eco sealant and Effetto Mariposa Caffelatex Tyre Sealant to name a few. My outright favourite being the Joe's Eco sealant, which has yet to fail me!
I have also used various rim strips, sealing tapes and Ghetto tubeless variants depending on the tyres and rims I have been using, all work to a certain extent, but for my uses the best rim sealing strip I have found is a trimmed inner tube which when the tyre is seated and sealed creates I guess what you could call a semi tubular tyre.
The inner tube sealing method is both cheaper and more versatile than most systems. I also use this system for mounting my standard tyres onto tubeless ready rims.
There are dozens of reasons for (and against) and ways of setting up tubeless, this is just my favourite method, and my reasons for doing this are simple convenience of not getting flat tyres when the puncture fairy visits, I also personally think the ride and handling is better, as for faster/lighter - heavier/slower? well that's something that really doesn't concern me, and I have found that my average speeds running tubeless have been similar if not a little quicker in some cases than running the same set of tyres with tubes.
Ok, so here is my Kingfisher Picnic Porteur bicycle which I hand built. I was originally running 26″ x 2.3″ (559 x 54mm) Rat Trap Pass TC Tyres which are very supple, thin cased tyres, tubeless ready. However I found that running them tubeless with Stans Tyre sealant, even the smallest of punctures would not seal fully, and when wet the sealed punctures could sometimes re-puncture, larger cuts of about 6mm would not seal at all due to the very thin tread and casing.I then switched to 26" x 2.0" (559 x 50mm) Schwalbe Kojak tyres and have ran them with tubes for the past couple of years, but since having a couple of flat tyres within the same week lately I decided to set these up tubeless, as on my other bikes with the same tyres run tubeless I have not had a single flat for years!
