Explain to me why why tubeless has better flat protection than clinchers with a tube ?
I get pinch flat protection is better. Is that it ? Is there anything else? Seems like the rubber is the same.
I get that tubeless usually / always gets set up with sealant.
Where I live and the roads I ride on I get about 1 flat every other year. It’s sometimes a side wall gash. Sometimes pinched flat from hole. Sometimes it’s something sharp I picked up. Is this flat rate standard for people that switch to tubeless? I try and keep my tires in good shape and change them somewhat frequently.
I’m not sure any two riders in different places can compare flat rates. When I used tubes on my MTB I’d have none for ages then they’d cut the hedges with a tractor, thorns everywhere and I did about 4 rides in a row and punctured every time. So switched to tubeless and it was back to fine. One time I did get a cut that didn’t seal. Took the tire off and there was probably 15-20 thorns embedded in it, each one would of stopped me mid ride had I been on tubes.
If you don’t get many of that type of punctures then it’s probably not worth it. For a road tire I’m still undecided. It’s higher pressure so doesn’t seal as well. At one point I was kicking myself for not getting race wheels that were tubeless ready but now not so much. For the MTB I wouldn’t want to go back to tubes.
For me, punctures on the road bike are always thorns.
The sealant seals them up, so as per the previous reply, whe I do finally remove the tyre, there’s often a dozen thorns in there thst I’d nor previously beem aware of (that all would have beem a puncture with tubes).
The pinch-flat protection I gain is on the mtb really (along with being able to reduce pressures to get more grip).
People forget that tubeless typically has sealant while clinchers don’t. So it’s an illusion that tubeless flat less. They do flat less, compared to clinchers with no sealant. The exception is with pinch flats, which shouldn’t happen on road bikes if you ride with proper psi. There is basically no difference between a clincher and tubeless if they both have sealant and inflated properly. People will have *stories *about how tubeless flats less, but people also have stories how they saw aliens or Jesus in a piece of toast.
I ride with Slime tubes in my mountain bike clinchers and when I eventually take the tires off to replace them, I have a couple dozen little green sealed puncture marks in the tubes from thorns or whatever and they never went flat. It’s exactly the same as tubeless, just can’t ride at as low a psi and if I do get a flat, I can just throw a new tube in. I’ve had zero flats in 10 years on that bike.
I have what I will just call an all-road bike that has relatively thin G-One Speed on the back. It rolls fast everywhere and once you get used to the idea that it will slide on anything, I don’t even mind it for when my riding tips more to mountain biking. Whenever I go into the garage later in the day, there are always six or seven or 12 little green wet spots on the tire. Now everyone one of those might not go through a tube, but probably two or three would. Tubeless allows me to run a relatively light, supple tire on the back and never get flats. I’ve never been stranded with that tire, even to include the time I ran over a push pin; it went flat and then when I put some more air in, it sealed enough to get me home.
If you only get one flat every other year, it might not be worth it. Then again, I love riding with big, cushy tires at 25psi. My most expensive bike won’t clear more than 25mm tires and it sits in the garage. My all-road bike has changed the way I think about cycling. It covers probably 90 percent of the gamut of cycling from pure road to pure mtb with gravel in the middle. The tires are probably responsible for 90 percent of that flexibility.
I’ve experimented with tubeless road, but not with dedicated, true tubeless rims, so it did not prove reliable. However, during the time I was doing it, I loved riding with 45-50 psi in my 25mm tires. Just smooth sailing.
They are the same old tires but sometimes the liquid sealant can fill up a hole. The downside is they often are quite difficult to remove and reinstall with a tube on the side of the road.
Going to assume you mean tubeless without sealant for the sake of this discussion because yes there is no difference IME with a straight tube. Heck I think the tube setup would actually fail less as there are more failure points in a tubeless tire less pinch flats. However, with sealant it vastly favors tubeless. The reason is because a hole in a tube is very hard to seal with sealant. I am sure we have discussed it from a very technical perspective before, but basically the tube has a hard time sealing. It is always moving against the tire for one, two, it is thin and very supple while a tire is thicker and more rigid. As a result the crystals build up a lot faster and their combined coverage is a lot larger when you think of the width of the sealant at the hole thus sealing the air release if this makes sense.
Thomas is right, there was a fornt page article a while back showing how sealant in a tube don’t work, while most of the time, if it fresh, it will work in a tubeless setup.
Currently running tubeless ready wheels but with thin butyl rubber (Conti supersonics) inside GP4000’s. I keep toying with the idea of going fully tubeless with the GP5000’s (and going to 28’s over 25’s).
Given that I’m in the UK, with notoriously crap & slow tarmac, I understand that the wider tyre on a lower pressure will give me less rolling resistance - but it’s the lifespan of the sealant that puts me off - does it really need topping up every few months? Is it normal to take old sealant out every so often?
It’s the maintenance of the sealant that I have question marks over…
(apologies to the OP for the slight digression - but it would seem to be a related issue)
interesting that sealant in a tubular tire works very nicely, given the sealant is filling up a tube sewn in an outer casing. It seems to be less effective at lower PSI seen in cross, but for the road it’s very good
Two main reasons people cite, the first one I think is unequivocally true, the second one isn’t really a differentiator IMO:
Most flats are “pinch” flats. Pinch flats are caused by violently compressing the tire carcass all the way down to the rim and pinching the tire and tube between the rim and the ground/rock/whatever. Tubeless tires are much, much harder to pinch flat because in order to pinch flat a tubeless tire you actually have to pinch the (very robust) tire sidewall itself, not just the tube.
Punctures are less common because you run sealant in all tubeless setups. This is not a unique benefit of tubeless as you can run sealant in a tubed setup. You do need special tubes with removable cores to do it.
In addition to the puncture resistance, there are two other main benefits to tubeless:
You can run lower pressures in a tubeless setup without fear of pinch flatting. I run 75-80 psi on my 28mm tubeless road setup while I run ~110 on a tubed 25mm setup. The lower pressure is both noticeably more comfortable and noticeably more grippy in corners.
Better rolling resistance. The best tubeless tires outperform most everything else.
Good tubeless road tires feel like the tubulars I used to race 20 years ago.
I’m sold on tubeless for MTB and gravel. I’m becoming a convert on the road. Obviously the drawbacks are setup is a pain (especially on the road) and if you flat, sticking a tube in there (again, especially on the road) is a huge pain. I will say that initial setup is much, much easier than it was in the early days of the sealant-less “Road Tubeless” standard but it’s still harder than simply throwing a tubed clincher on.