Let's hear it for tubeless

[BankFodder]

Well I was halfway through a 40 mile ride yesterday in the pouring rain. I noticed a funny spray pattern coming off my front wheel and only eventually realised that it was air coming through the wet tyre surface at high pressure from a leak.

 

I've been running tubeless fur about a year or so and it's been great because I have noticed a few pinhole punctures which haven't caused any problem and have scarcely resulted in any lowering of tyre pressure.

 

This was different. On the surface it was about a 1 cm cut although it was only a very small hole on the inside of the tyre – as I later found out.

 

Anyway the tyre lost a lot of pressure. I really thought that I was going to have to take the thing off and put in an inner tube on the side of the road in the wet.

 

When I stopped, there was still some air in the tire and I decided simply to try super gluing a patch over the hole on the outside of the tyre to give the sealant a chance to work.

 

It was amazing, I was back up and running within a minute and although I wasn't able to pump it up to a really good pressure, it was good enough to do the remaining 15 or so miles back home.

 

I'm so impressed with tubeless. The other people that I was riding with – and who didn't realise that I was riding tubeless – were amazed as well.

[deighton2002]

since I got Continental puncture resistant tyres about 8 months ago, I've only had one puncture on a daily commute - that's down from about one every month or more. That isn't tubeless though