# Tubes, tubeless, or slime?



## febikes (Jan 28, 2011)

On my "real" mountain bike I have proper tubeless tires with Stans rims. They setup nice and short of a major casing cut I pretty much never have flats. I am a huge fan of tubeless technology. 

The only problem is.....

I recently build up a new dedicated commuting bike and got some cheap wheels. With the cheap rims the tires did not setup tubeless.

What are you guys using for your commuting bikes? Are you going tubeless or running old style tubes? Does anyone use slime in tubes and does that approach work as well as proper tubeless tires?


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## CommuterBoy (Oct 4, 2007)

I'm Ghetto tubeless on my commuter... WTB Speed disc rims, gorilla tape, homebrew sealant, non-tubeless specific tires. No flats on that bike in 3 years, and I'm in Goathead country.


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

I haven't gone tubeless on my commuter, but I've thought about it the next time I replace tires. I've got a few hundred miles left on my current ones, and IME, it's not worth attempting to convert old tires to tubeless.

I just run tubes in my commute bike. No issues so far, but the tires have a kevlar belt in them as well as thicker rubber in the tread area for puncture resistance. It'd be nice to have the same low incidence of problems, but with lighter and more supple tires. So, I've had no reason to try putting Slime in my tubes, either.


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## Straz85 (Mar 20, 2009)

I just run flat resistant tires with tubes. Conti Gatorskins on my road and commuter. 3k miles and 1 flat (very sharp metal shard made it's way through).


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## MrMatson (Oct 12, 2012)

I'm running good old fashion tubes in my commuter. I've got cheap wheels and don't want to hassle with tubeless. I haven't had any problems with flats in a very long time. I've run slime in the past and it helps if you have issues with small punctures from goatheads or similar.

I do run tubeless on my mountain bike but that has much better wheels/tires and I run significantly lower pressures so pinch-flatting is a concern.


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## bedwards1000 (May 31, 2011)

I haven't jumped into the tubeless arena yet. Somehow it sees like it would be messy and I think you have to replace the sealant on some kind of interval - Ain't nobody got time for that. I have used the self sealing tubes with good luck on my foul weather bikes. Otherwise, I just change flats as I get them. I also keep the pressure pretty high in the MTB tires because I am a pinch flat expert.


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## nemhed (May 2, 2010)

I've just recently converted my mountain bike to ghetto tubeless and the conversion went well. So far I'm liking it. I'm still running slime tubes in my commuter and I'm not quite ready to make that leap yet. The slime tubes have been working well, but I also feel like maybe I've just been lucky. Last year I did have a staple in a tire that poked several pairs of holes in the tube and the slime couldn't keep up. One of my concerns with tubeless is dealing with the sealant mess on the side of the road while trying to fix a flat so I can make it home or to work.


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## ononecarbon456 (Jul 13, 2012)

Full ghetto tubeless on my MTB and Stans No Tubes in the tubes on my Commuter bike punctures are a distant memory.

See here for Ghetto Tubeless Conversion using gorilla tape: How to on ghetto tubeless conversion using Gorilla tape - YouTube

See here about inflating the tyre:

How to inflate a tubeless bike tyre - YouTube

See here for running tubes with Stans in: Puncture proof flat proof your existing bikes inner tubes quickly, simply, effectively - YouTube

Cheers

Go out ride and enjoy.

Joel

PS ref changing the sealant only change it once you start getting puncture again... simple as that.


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## bedwards1000 (May 31, 2011)

Good videos Joel. You skipped over the part where you actually got the bead to seal on the how to inflate video which seems like it might be the toughest part. Anyway, I might have to experiment with it sometime. 

Cheers!


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## jeffscott (May 10, 2006)

febikes said:


> On my "real" mountain bike I have proper tubeless tires with Stans rims. They setup nice and short of a major casing cut I pretty much never have flats. I am a huge fan of tubeless technology.
> 
> The only problem is.....
> 
> ...


I have three sets of UST rims (1 Mavic and 2 Shimano)...

I run tubeless Knobbies, tubeless studs (they now have tubes because the side walls will no longer seal some 12000 km on them), and slicks. I ran the slicks tubeless but like most tires after significant amount of wear...15000 km the side walls do not seal up anymore.

My last flat was a pinch on the rear slick going over a plate of metal.....the front tire was down to 30 psi (normally I run it at 70 +psi).

I should maybe get some new tires and pay attention to the pressure more.


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## jeffscott (May 10, 2006)

bedwards1000 said:


> I think you have to replace the sealant on some kind of interval - Ain't nobody got time for that.


Stongly temperature dependant....maybe a month in Arizona....maybe twice a year in Canada.


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## newfangled (Sep 13, 2010)

This is going to be really long...

I think it really depends where you live, and what kindof tires you run. I am not in goathead country, and I tend to run big tires, so I maybe get 1 flat per year.

I ran my three bikes tubeless for about a year and a half. They were all ghetto setups, with a pretty random mixture of tires and rims. They all went pretty well, but I'm back to tubes.

For me it came down to time.

Once I got really good at doing tubeless setups it still took at least 45 minutes per tire - between cleaning the old goop out of the tire and off the bead and rim, and airing it up, and shaking it, and letting it sit, I just could not get any faster. I have two bikes that I swap to studs over the winter and it just took too long.

I also had more mystery leaks than I would have liked. Your tire is inexplicably flat after work, and it sounds like your sealant has dried up because you left it too long. You add some sealant, give it a shake, and hooray it's holding air! Tubeless is great! Except that sometimes it's flat again the next morning. Then you spend an hour troubleshooting where the leak is, when changing a tube would take five minutes.

I have one bike that sits all winter. I checked on it, added sealant once or twice, and gave the tires a spin, but by spring both tires were flat. I added more sealant, and the front tire was basically good to go. But the rear tire never sealed again properly, and after a few weeks of slow leaks I had to pull it off, clean it up, and redo the tubeless from scratch.

Tubeless was great at first, but it got worse over time as gunk built up on things. The bead seals got less reliable and more prone to mystery leaks. And my biggest frustration was the valve cores - whenever I really needed to add sealant, they were inevitably gummed up.

tl;dr version:

In a normal year I'd maybe spend 2 hours swapping studs on and off and fixing a flat or two. In the year and a half I ran tubeless I figure I spent upwards of 24 hours futzing with my tires.

Now I run normal tubes, but I carry 2oz of sealant in my toolbag. If I have a flat I just inject a bit of sealant through the stem. I had to do that once last winter, the tube aired up, and is still going strong.


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## ghettocruiser (Jun 21, 2008)

jeffscott said:


> Stongly temperature dependant....maybe a month in Arizona....maybe twice a year in Canada.


I am indeed in Canada, but I don't actually *replace* the sealant, I just add watered-down stans before the stuff in the tire completely dries, and then pop the bead off maybe once a year, and scrap out the dried stuff to "save rotating weight".

So far this has worked for the useful tread life of most tires.

On-topic. I use tubeless for everything but my road bike.... and I seem to get a lot of flats on my road bike.


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## leeboh (Aug 5, 2011)

There is a new road tubeless setup. Rim and tire interface.


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## camekanix (Sep 1, 2012)

I tried the same tubeless setup I use on my MTB. Gorilla tape, Stans stems and Stans sealer. I ran 100psi and ended up losing air between the valve stem and its rubber base. When I took the stems out the stems looked like they were pushed out of the rubber bases slightly. This is in June-July heat in AZ so rubber does get soft. I'll keep doing tubeless in my MTB but went back to tubes on my commuter.


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## AndrwSwitch (Nov 8, 2007)

Plain tubes. Tires with the usual puncture resistant belt. I really only have trouble with the cheapest road slicks, with no puncture resistant belt at all.


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## mack_turtle (Jan 6, 2009)

Get some good, tough tires. They will be heavy. I have Bontrager hardcase 700x32s and have never had a flat on them. ( knock on wood)


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## aBicycle (Jun 13, 2012)

Are smart guards worth the weight and cost over green guards? Anyone tried both?


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## J.B. Weld (Aug 13, 2012)

Panaracer Pasela TourGuards and standard tubes. They roll well and I never worry about flatting.

There are others, but I agree that a good tire combined with a regular tube works well.


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## big_papa_nuts (Mar 29, 2010)

I have been running belted tires, usually Conti or Schwalbe, for the last eight years or so with very good results. I'll usually pick up a nail or screw once or twice a year and have to change a flat roadside but that only takes a few minutes and is actually a hugely empowering experience. Given how few flats I get I have recently gone to ultralight tubes to cut some rotational weight with excellent results.


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## CommuterBoy (Oct 4, 2007)

On the nuisance/maintenance of tubeless: 

Before tubeless I was dealing with 7-12 flats per commute 'year' (school year for me, I'm a teacher). After Tubeless I deal with 0-1. 

I mixed up my own homebrew sealant (search for a thread in the 29er components section called "best tubeless brew"), and I have gone 10 months without adding sealant (pushing my luck there, but I average 4 or 5 months before I worry about it and add sealant...which takes about 2 minutes per tire if you use removeable-core valves, like the Stans ones, which I do. 

Jeffscott is right about temperature affecting sealant life... defininately can go longer in the winter. 

The 'hassle' of tubeless, based on my experience, is completely nonexistant. It can be a pain to get a tire to seat sometimes...so maybe once a year you have to do the air compressor/tire/rim dance to get a tire to seat up. Other than that, the predictability of it is total bliss compared to the "am I going to get a flat?" nature of using tubes. 

Would you rather change 10 tubes a year, or squirt some sealant into a valve stem once a year, while being virtually guaranteed no flats? To me it's a no-brainer. 



If you don't care about weight AND don't want to go through the tire-seating process, injecting sealant into a traditional tube is a win/win...although you still run the risk of a pinch flat. 

After being tubeless a few years, I see tubes as a 'band-aid' fix to get me home in an emergency, but I'd never use them long-term.


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## blockphi (Mar 26, 2012)

I ride a fat tired bike year round on my commute and the only flats I have had have been from ripping the stems out in the winter when rolling at less than 5 PSI. In the summer I've rolled over glass and other detritus and, because of the lower pressures haven't yet had a puncture. Of course, riding a fatty with low pressure tires year round had made my legs look like He-Man's, but that's another story....

In the past, in South Dakota with a high number of goat head thorns, I used slime liners - which worked fine until they got kinked, then they became the cause of the flats. I've also use kevlar impregnated tires and found that they generally work really well. I've not yet made the switch to tubeless so have no opinion on that.


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## CommuterBoy (Oct 4, 2007)

^^ I tried those slime liners before I was tubeless (same issue...goatheads), and if you let the pressure go down below "as high as humanly possible" the edges of the liners would wear grooves in the tubes, and cause flats. The "Mr. Tuffy" liners have tapered edges which I thought would prevent this, but I went tubeless before I had a chance to try them.


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## crossracer (Jun 27, 2004)

I run conti gator skins with mr tuffy and slime tires. 
Cause nothing sucks more then getting a flat at 5:15 am on a rainy morning. 

Bill


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

I used some liners (forget the brand) many years ago on my mtb and found that my local thorns (from honey locust and osage orange trees) are stout enough that they laugh at tire liners.

Haven't used them in over a decade.


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## big_papa_nuts (Mar 29, 2010)

CommuterBoy said:


> On the nuisance/maintenance of tubeless:
> 
> Before tubeless I was dealing with 7-12 flats per commute 'year' (school year for me, I'm a teacher). After Tubeless I deal with 0-1.
> 
> ...


Tell me about the last few flats you got? I think my biggest fear is the mess of it. It's also hard to find good commuter tires that are worth using tubeless, all things considered.


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## CommuterBoy (Oct 4, 2007)

I have had one puncture that the tubeless goo couldn't handle...a roofing nail or something that I pulled out...should have left it in there. If I had left it, it would have sealed up and I could have pulled it out at home. But I pulled it out, and it drained my goo on the side of the road. Couldn't get it to seal. So you throw a tube in there and hit the road. It's a little messy, but no big deal. 

The only other flats I've gotten have been when I went to get on the bike and found the tire flat... letting the sealant dry out a bit too much. Add air, ride it for a couple more days adding air every once in a while, add sealant at your leisure.

So one "mess" (meaning just put a tube in) in 4 or 5 years. 

I have used Schwalbe Big Apples tubeless and I'm currently using Serfas Drifters. In my opinion, any tire worth using is worth using tubeless. And the cheaper the tire, the more likely you are to get punctures, so the more reason to use it tubeless.


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## quax (Feb 21, 2009)

The entire family MTB fleet runs tubeless on Stan's rims and Conti sealant. The entire fleet? No, two bikes resist: my road bike and my cyclocross bike converted to a commuter mule (fenders, pannier rack, ...). I run rather heavy tubes with Vittoria's Voyager Hyper 37 tires. Lot's of cobble stone roads, poorly maintained bike lanes and gravel roads here. Add my heavy work notebook (home office 2 days a week). I used to run 28 Conti 4-seasons but I had too many flats with them. And volume was an issue.

Though I'm completely convinced of tubeless the main reason for not running it on my commuter is the need to pump up the tire more often. On a commuter this is too much of a hassle since I always run my tires at the lowest possible air pressure. Additionally, I car-bike-commute very often.


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## Skelldify (May 10, 2013)

I've decided to try the tubes w/slime after tearing 3 sidewalls on brand new tires in the last 2 months. Been running tubeless for two years and thought it was the greatest thing ever until I started tearing these sidewalls. Stan's obviously won't seal sidewall tears as they're too big/rough. Gonna try the slime tubes as a way to resurrect these three torn sidewall tires.


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## Harold (Dec 23, 2003)

You are buying the wrong tires if you keep tearing sidewalls

Sent from my DROID BIONIC using Tapatalk


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## Skelldify (May 10, 2013)

Maxxis Ardent, Schwable Nobby Nic, and Maxxis DHR2. I'm all ears if you know of a tire with better sidewall protection. Note, it has to be 275, which unfortunately narrows the choices down a bit.


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## AndrwSwitch (Nov 8, 2007)

You need the right construction too. In Schwalbe, I think the ones with more protection are "snakeskin." In Maxxis, I think it's "EXO."


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