Flat Attack did a great job in Slowtwitch sealant test. Plus it doesn't dry out and effectively last the life of your inner tube. Not sure if Finish Line will dry out or not.

Add me to the group that tried it for a while and bailed. I run Vittoria latex for years now. For about 2 years I was using Orange Seal. Mostly it was extra work, a bit messy and didn't seem to have any impact on my flat rate (which is already pretty darn low). Also, I found it annoying in clogging my valve cores, which since I need to pump up every ride due to latex was a pain. So I bailed a couple years back and haven't regretted it. What is funny is that in that same time I stopped using road sealant I took up MTB and feel like sealant there is like magic (of course the MTB is tubeless and I haven't gone road tubeless so not quite apples to apples).

same

I have similar sentiments. Tubeless for me on my mountain bike has been headache and flat free. I’ve found punctures in my mtb tired but I can also see that the sealant did its job. Not so much for my road bike. I think air pressure, casing/tread thickness, and possibly deformation are the factors at play.

 am I correct in saying you would also to have to replace the sealant and or tube pretty regularly keep it fresh? I ride latex year round. I like the way latex feels over butyl. Id argue that nothing can beat lambskin lol

I use Vttoria latex tubes & Bontrager TLR for training and racing. I swap new tubes in my race wheels at the beginning of race season just as a matter of course. I wear training tires fast enough that they get replaced a couple times a year regardless. Only down side I've had is a clogged valve core on occasion. It only takes 2-3min to add the sealant since I need to remove the valve cores for extenders anyway. I chose TLR based on the Slowtwitch sealant review.

So we've done quite a bit of work on this with a couple of pro teams and the reality is that it's really all still on a continuum of benefits and tradeoffs... as much as we always want this stuff to be cut and dried, it just never is!!

Here's what we found last year, sorry, can't yet tell you what we are doing THIS year! (but the directionality is similar)

1. Sealant just works better at lower pressures.. that sealant blowing through a hole just has a way better shot at coagulating and hardening when the pressure differential is 24psi-ambient than it does when the differential is 100psi-ambient, so testing it over and over again, you will just NEVER get similar results on road as MTN

2. All sealants seem to exist on a continuum running between fast sealing/fast drying to slow sealing/lasts a long time. This is a major reason that we never entered this market, the science is pretty sound and everybody really just has to stake their claim somewhere on the continuum as being 'better sealing' or 'doesn't dry out' etc.. We've replicated this in our testing over and over. Last year Orange Seal joined forces with Bora after testing showed that it was the best as sealing flats in classics style racing and we used it in both tubulars and latex tubed clinchers off and on all year, but the reality is that it requires care and attention and it dries out faster than would be ideal. Similarly, we tried others which didn't dry out, but they also didn't really work to seal hardly any flats.. so there's the tradeoff.

3. Orange Seal and CafeLatex worked best with latex tubes at sealing flats in our testing, Orange seal fixed more flats, CafeLatex lasted longer.. As a pro with somebody else doing the work I'd pick OrangeSeal, if I was maintaining it, I'd pick Cafe Latex

4. Some sealants just don't work at all at road pressures.. Not naming names, but Stan's would be a third place finisher on this list and if I didn't name your name, you just didn't work, or if you are a new or tiny brand maybe we just didn't try you, but we tried lots of sealants with lots of name brands and different marketing and they are all somewhere on this continuum and most of them didn't work so well.

5. Work the numbers. In a pro team, the wheels are set up with various tires for different events and that setup sort of defines the probability of flatting. If we are pulling out the 28's for a Flanders or Strade Bianchi then sealant makes a lot of sense.. these tires are used for just a few months per year and the flat risk is high while the pressures are low. If we have the rider on 23's, then the surfaces are good, the flat risk is low and the pressures are high.. you can see the interplay here that when the flat risk is low, the pressures also tend to be higher which significantly reduces the effectiveness of the sealant anyway.. so for those events not as worth it.

6. When running tubeless it is almost always a benefit and rarely a detriment. For TT's EF has been running Vittoria Corsa Speed TLR tubeless setups, where the sealant not only helps seal the system on install but also reduces pressure loss over time, AND it might possibly also help seal a flat.. This is a much more favorable scenario to running sealant in latex where sealant often times is adding little benefit at the cost of a lot of headache around install and maintenance.

Best of luck!
Josh

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Hi Josh thanks for the breakdown it is very helpful. I have always run Stans and has saved me luckily late in the race to limp home to great effect with as you say low pressure without having to stop. Why do you say Orange Seal requires more maintenance? Does it go hard sooner than Cafe Latex or Stans? I have no issue with the maintenance I just want the most effective and what I am in for. Cheers

So I would think of the continuum this way.. all of the good sealants are essentially liquid latex that is thinned out with propylene glycol to give is lower viscosity but also keep it from drying out, the more glycol the longer it lasts, but the thinner it gets which makes it less capable of filling large cuts/gashes.

Then they have some sort of coagulating strategy
CafeLatex has a foaming agent which causes sheets of foam bubble walls to collapse on each other as they try to escape
Stan's has corn meal in a couple of different grits, so little boulders stacking up to create a dam in a stream
Orange Seal uses a couple sizes of glitter, so more like blood platelets damming up the flow at the hole.

So the combination of initial viscosity and inclusions in the recipe have inverse effects on life expectancy and sealing capability. Less glycol means it dries out faster, more coagulants or coagulants with more surface area generally mean it will dry out faster.

So our testing consistently shows that CafeLatex is excellent at sealing pinhole type punctures at higher pressures.. the theory is that because it makes a foam that is constantly covering more of the inner tire surface, and the foam is light, it gets to the puncture faster and more sealant is driven in the direction of the puncture by escaping air as opposed to more liquid sealants where the puncture might have to roll through the puddle of sealant a few times to access enough sealant to close the hole.

OrangeSeal is best at sealing larger holes and cuts but dries out in maybe 3-6 months and is also better at sealing valve stems if you aren't careful.. so probably it's the best at sealing, but also requires the most work.

Stan's is in between the two, good at sealing, average amount of work.

Last point is that Cafelatex uses synthetic latex rather than organic latex which seems to make it less reactive with latex inner tubes in my experience. I would expect to get 6-9 months out of a latex tube or tubular with Stan's or OrangeSeal while I've got tubulars that have had CafeLatex in them for 2 years and are still fine.

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Josh, were you using regular Stan's or Stan's race? Same or OS, regular or endurance?

Thanks Josh for your detailed reply it is greatly appreciated

+1 for Flat Attack. I've been using this with good results for most of my pro career. I know it's working because I'll occasionally find evidence of sealed punctures when I replace tubes. Flat Attack is in a minority of sealants that are glycol-based as opposed to latex-based. Perhaps this different composition is a way to circumvent the "continuum running between fast sealing/fast drying to slow sealing/lasts a long time" that joshatsilca mentioned.

Flat Attack dries out slower than most other sealants, but I'm not buying their claim that it can last for years. I get about a year out of it in latex tubes in my race wheels, possibly shortened due to frequent inflation/deflation for travel. Another plus is that it won't react at all with latex.

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So my Silica latex tubes with extensions are on the way.

If I use caffelatex sealant, I will be safe to just start each season with new set of tubes or obviously replace if I do have a flat?

Honestly, we tested Stan's and Stan's race vs OrangeSeal with Bora last year and seems that the Race is more or less the same formula with less glycol so it behaves more like OrangeSeal.. in the end we went with Orange seal which was the ONLY OrangeSeal at that time. I imagine that endurance OS is probably just the same stuff with more glycol in it so that it is probably equivalent to original Stan's.. BUT I haven't tested it.

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I’ve been using Orange Seal in latex tubes for a few years. If Caffelatex behaves similarly then what you have to avoid is letting your tires deflate all the way for any period of time. When this happens the latex tube often sticks to itself and this can end up destroying the tube. This issue can make travel a PITA depending on your bike case.

Like Trail, I’ve kind of given up on using sealant and latex for most of our bikes. For my wife’s races I still do it as she’s usually in podium contention and this is fairly low cost insurance against minor punctures. I say low cost because adding sealant to latex guarantees they’ll be full of dried seals junk later. After a few months I end up reusing her dried up sealant filled tubes for regular riding if I haven’t screwed up and sealed the insides together at some point.

I have done the same but reading this thread maybe I will switch now?

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