Do the zipp tubulars have removable valve core?
They use the highest quality latex tubes from Europe and have removable valve cores.
Just saw on the website that you’re going to offer 650c x 19mm tires soon. Are the smaller profile tires recommended on smaller wheels? I know you said that 21mm was optimal, but I don’t remember you saying if that was for 700c only and if it changes for 650c.
Thanks!
Josh,
Thanks for all the info the past couple of days. I just bought 2 Zipp tubies online Wed.
What is your take on using sealant with the Zipp tubies?
Ditto to what Drinyth asked.
It’s my understanding that sealant only works with Tufo tubies. Tufo tubies don’t have a tube that is seperate from the tire so to speak. Normal tubulars you should be able to unsew and take the tubes out of, but with Tufos the whole tire is one piece so to speak. On the plus side, it’s due to this design that the sealant works. The sealant will spray out of the whole in the punctured inner tube and seal up the casing surrounding it. But I don’t think that’ll work with traditional tubulars.
a 19mm tire is pretty close to the same width as the wheel, so aerodynamically, it is optimal. However, the curve of the gluing surface of the rim is most often times too slight to provide adequate contact with the tire. I have glued a few this way, but would never take a corner hard with that setup. OK for TT’s and the like. The diameter of the tire makes little difference. I’m sure someone will chime in about the rolling resistance benefits of a wider tire as well. So I will refine my statement: 19mm tubulars are OK for timed track events - flying km, hour, that sort of thing.
The 650c tire is something we’ve been working on for a while, and it is not yet perfected, but there are a few reasons it will be 19mm. Unfortunately the economics of doing anything in 650c is not very good as the volume of 650 has been dropping for some years now. When we looked at dimpling the 404 650c tooling last year, we determined that even if our sales had stayed the same as the prior year, it would take us nearly 10 years to break even on just the machining cost to do the dimpling…that’s not very good economics. We do feel fortunate that we are able to continue to offer 650c wheels in most models at a time when most companies have dropped their 650c lineups, or at least cut back the options available in 650. Having said all that, even if we sold 3 tires for every 650c wheelset, we would be looking at something like 7 or 8 years to pay off the tooling for a custom tread tool and casing tool for a 650c tire, so the next best concept was to take an existing mold and rework it. We have purchased the rights to a tread mold that we have reworked to remove the tread lip from the side of the tire, but this effectively means removing 0.5mm from each side of the tire due to tread thinning at the interface. Effectively, this is a 20mm tire with a tread on it that has been tweaked for optimal aerodynamics and resulted in a tire with 19mm width. Ideally, we would have preferred a 21mm tire (which means starting with a 22mm tire, which is why everything about it would have to be custom tooled), but the downside would be a tire that would not work with any other wheel on the market other than ours, a selling price well over $100 and us losing money on every single one of them…so in all, it just didn’t make sense. The upside is that we will be able to deliver a tire with the utmost quality and durability with sligthtly lower rolling resistance and better ride quality than a traditional 19mm tire (due to using a casing designed for 20mm tire) that will work very well with not only Zipp wheels, but with every other 650c size wheel on the market currently, which we are hoping will help increase the sales potential of the tire, which allows us to reduce the price as we can amortize the tooling rework and engineering time over more units…
I don’t have a time frame currently on when these will actually see daylight, as we only recently finished testing our latest samples, but hopefully it will be soon, and at this point we believe we will be able to keep the price similar to that of the 700c tire ($80).
Josh,
Thanks for all the info! That’s really helpful and insightful. As an owner of a 650c bike with 3 pairs of 650c wheels (including my trusty Zipp 909 set), it’s sad to see that many manufacturers are steering away from making bikes with these wheels.
I’m hoping that the trend comes back to the 650c’s one day, but I’m not holding my breath. :-/
Thanks again!