Clincher Tire Problem

Triathlon Forum
1

Experienced something new last night during my roller workout.

I’ve been using Veloflex Pave’s for over a year now and love 'em. They were inflated to about 115 psi. At about the 15 minute mark, things started to vibrate. I stopped and examined my rear tire and noticed a pronounced bulge in the sidewall. Deflated the tire and examined further and found that the sidewall had separated from the kevlar bead.

I’m just wondering whether this was a freak occurance, or something that’s more common and I’ve just been lucky up to this point.

2

Easily cured with…tubulars ;-0
.

3

I would characterize that as anomolistic. That is a freak occurence. I have only seen that, maybe, twice in the bike industry.

4

Not to be obvious, but you checked the alignment of your brake pads, right?

5

I had this happen 3 times last year on my rear tire on new bontrager race x lite wheels. I attributed it to very old tires that I had on the shelf for about 5 to 10 years, yes I had stocked up years ago. When I placed a newer tire on the rim, I haven’t had the problem.

Bob

6

No, wasn’t the brake pad. I was on rollers anyway.

Veloflex tires are supposedly ‘hand made’. It appears that when the kevlar bead is installed, they just sort of fold the sidewall over and bond/glue the bead in place. Looks like in my case, the bonding/gluing gave way. The kevlar bead wasn’t broken and the outer edge of the sidewall was flat in about a 4 inch section.

http://www.veloflextires.com/clincher_construction.htm

Just ordered a replacement. Still like them enough to give 'em a second chance.

Had a Conti GP3000 a couple years back make a big bang and leave me riding on my front rim at 20 mph. (It was a few hundred miles into that tire/tube/installation combination so I don’t believe it was installation error.) THAT freaked me out enough to steer away from Continentals since that incident.