Interesting. So it doesn’t scour the internet like a search engine, it just makes stuff up if it doesn’t have an answer? How do you even know if the answer it gives is correct, the whole thing seems worthless?
AND that is why the story doesn’t have a pig make a house out of shit!
LLMs use the training data they have been given to create the most statistically probable responses (literally trying to predict the next word they should write). They are great for summation and aggregation (ask one for a five paragraph essay on the Treaty of Versailles and it will do a bangup job since there are lots of example to train on), but not as sources of truth. It’s that “looking for the most probable word” that leads to hallucinations (combined with some purposeful randomness). They just are not that good at differentiating opinion from fact, or knowing that they don’t know something.
Here’s an example I often use (below). I asked ChatGPT the same question twice in March of 2025.
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This is actually pretty common. What almost always causes this is a gap in the rim tape that allows the air to leak out from the wheel well and into the enclosed area of the disc cover (or rim, if it’s a deep section rim), damaging the bond between the cover and the rim, or the outer wall of the rim and the rim bed.
As mentioned up thread, if this is a bonded cover on a spoked wheel, it may well be largely to entirely cosmetic damage. Again, as mentioned up thread, if there are spoke heads under the rim tape, you’ll know that it’s a spoked/covered wheel. If there aren’t any, this doesn’t rule out spoked construction, it just makes it less likely; wheels can be tensioned prior to having a cover bonded on.
If you were the original owner, this would likely be a warranty issue (I had a client get one covered under warranty for exactly this problem a couple of months back), but pretty unlikely as a used purchase. Worth trying, though.
FWIW, folks just shouldn’t run wheels tubeless if they don’t have vent holes in the rim. If you have wheels without vent holes and you want to run them tubeless, you should drill vent holes in them or have someone do this for you.
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Did you really mean rim? Isn’t it in the main disc area you need the vent?
Most of the skinned wheels are deep section carbon rims under the skin, so you really need to make sure that section is vented. Pretty often when damage like the OP has happens, it’s not actually the skin/cover that blew off so much as the deep section rim underneath it exploded. If it comes from the factory with a vent hole in the skin, you can maybe assume that they were smart/cared enough to vent the rim itself. If there isn’t, you probably shouldn’t.
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The vent hole is to prevent structural damage if air leaks from the tire/rim bed area (blue) into the rim body (red). A cover would have an additional hole, or enough access to atmosphere (ex. the valve cutout) that one is not needed.
I had a friend who had a leak in her rim strip and the bike shop pumped in enough air to blow out the rim body and destroy the wheel (it was an ENVE from before they had vent hole) right before she was to fly off to 70.3 worlds.
The valve hole on many of these is fully enclosed, and doesn’t vent the inside of either the rim or the skin. A surprisingly large number of them don’t have vent holes in rim or skin, and I have seen wheels with vented skins that had un-vented rims (and were destroyed by leaking rim strips as a result).
With several (most, honestly) of the Asian manufacturer direct wheels they’re more than happy to drill vent holes for you if you ask, but you do have to ask. They will often produce rims with and without vents as OE, they just might have omitted that extra step on their direct product.
As mentioned previously, damage that appears to be to the skin of a skinned disc/spoked wheel is often overpressure to the deep section rim underneath, as you describe in your post. Just because there’s a hole in the skin, doesn’t mean there’s a hole in the rim. If folks don’t see one on their wheel, they should ask the manufacturer if there is one hidden underneath the skin, or create one themselves, just to be safe.
I just want to be very clear here… Unless you are a professional that knows 100% what they are doing and you don’t really care about your warranty.. you should probably NOT start putting holes in your wheels..
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It’s not like some of the manufacturers of these products are actually recommending that people do this themselves…
I know, right? Except when I tried to drill this 14mm hole, the tire wouldn’t stay on the rim anymore.
14mm is a big hole! 
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Those look like super legit wheels too.
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The hole should not be 14mm in diameter, that hole should be spaced 14mm from the edge of the rim.
A 14mm hole would affect the structural integrity of the rim, the hole itself would only need to be 1mm in diameter to allow air to escape.
Ahh, ok I was confused. Do you think they mean metric mm’s or imperial mm’s - I’d want to make sure I use the right side of the ruler.
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