FlatOut and -9F, Comedy Gold

[mschwett]

Exactly why I'm sketchy on going tubeless, even if the weight savings on a fat bike do look attractive. I went tubeless on my 3 speed cruiser, and after four curb "burps" I went right back to having tubes. Consensus among a lot of local riders I've talked to here in Keene NH is that between the curbs lacking depressions to cross, potholes, and just plain wide road-width cracks that can at speed throw you off the pedals, tubeless takes too m3uch maintenance and leaves you stranded too often.

Makes me wonder how the off-road guys even find it viable.

i think a lot comes down to setup and tube/rim compatibility. i have literally thousands of miles on my tubeless setup, city streets, badly paved rural roads, gravel, and some singletrack, not a single flat or sealant “incident” other than one clogged valve stem right at the initial setup. then again, i don’t ride into curbs.

all my off road guys swear by it, it’s not even really a question any more for them.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

Tubeless works perfectly normal on gravel bikes and MTBs. Given proper rims, tape, tyres and sealant (properly replenished), the benefits outweigh the downsides. It is typical for a gravel cycling group ride (and these are for big distances) that at least one rider experiences the inner tube puncture on a ride. That never happens to tubeless riders, and the tubeless riders typically inflate their wheels lowly for better shock absorption in rough terrain and for better traction. (MTBers go with low tyre pressure on a regular basis).

A friend of mine riding a gravel bike tells me he had 4-6 punctures yearly with tubes. He had no single puncture after he went tubeless.

I am not an advocate for tubeless for other bike types, though. Too much hassle.

 

[Jason Knight]

A friend of mine riding a gravel bike tells me he had 4-6 punctures yearly with tubes. He had no single puncture after he went tubeless.

That's fascinating, I'd have thought it would be the other way around since tubeless there's less material to stop the puncture.

Is this like plastic vs. aluminum phone or laptop cases, where the aluminum is actually inferior because it breaks before it will bend and comparatively has no impact absorbency? Thus why there's as much rubber as steel on my Ulephone Armor? Without the tube there's more give? Would make sense as you mentioned riding lower pressures too.

Always something new to learn.

 

[m@Robertson]

Tubeless in my experience is fantastic so long as the holes are thorns or small nails (that you pull out immediately and let the sealant seal the hole, not the nail in the hole). At that point, the traditional sealants (the various flavors of Orange Seal and Stans) all work a treat. Where all of them fall down is when you start getting into larger holes. Tubeless tires can use the side of bacon style plugs to extend this functionality to bigger holes, or you can use a sealant that seals holes bigger than what the plugs can handle, so you just keep riding after pulling out the nail or bolt.

I started using FlatOut as a tubeless sealant after talking to their product engineer responsible for the bicycle variant they have tested (the Sportsman formula). Essentially... they had never tested it as a tuvbeless sealant but figured it should work. So I tried it and it sealed up just great initially, and has remained in the tires I used it for ... I think its in its second year on my first install. The worst puncture it sealed I have mentioned here before: A nailgun strip of six roofing nails that I was able to reinflate thanks to my use of an ebike-powered air compressor. It took three refills - once about every couple of blocks - before all the holes sealed and the tire is still on the wheel and working today.

As a tube sealant, the worst I ever handed it, was a jagged strip of metal roughly ... 3/8"? ... wide. Think hose clamp fragment. Thats not what it was but it was like a twisted bit of metal shaped and sized like that.

Look at all of the sealants, and none of them advertise functionality up to 1/2" except FlatOut. Given what I've seen it do, and what I've seen the other sealants fail at, I switched to FlatOut for everything and haven't been disappointed yet.

I ride pretty much daily in weather down to about freezing. When I was in the Grand Canyon riding around the South Rim in April, it was in the 20's on the morning rides, so thats below freezing. Those tires were 26x2.35" so I used about 1/4 bottle per tire which is 8 oz.

As @PedalUma noted, if you ride a bike for transportation/utility, no flats are allowed. I usually back FlatOut up with belted tires and thick tubes. I've had enough failures with Tannus to stop using it. The wheels that have it installed can keep it but I am done buying the stuff.

 

[m@Robertson]

That's fascinating, I'd have thought it would be the other way around since tubeless there's less material to stop the puncture.

If you have the right sealant, thats what happens. Its not about the material in the way of stopping a puncture. Figure that nothing can stop a puncture... not quite true but generally so. The thing that stops all the air escaping is the sealant. If the air stays in you can have all the punctures you want. My worst was about 50-100 goatheads in each of my two tires (Maxxis Hookworms... so no belts). I was using Orange Seal Endurance at the time; tubeless. It worked but I spent so much time clearing out the thorns I almost wanted to throw the tire away.

 

[Jason Knight]

Tubeless in my experience is fantastic so long as the holes are thorns or small nails (that you pull out immediately and let the sealant seal the hole, not the nail in the hole).

My ex used to give me **** for "wasting my time" checking the tires after each ride. Sooner you catch the damage, sooner you can do something about it.
And that was before I had an e-bike with fat tires. I would suspect that with the larger contact patch the odds of hitting bad stuff climbs a bit.

Look at all of the sealants, and none of them advertise functionality up to 1/2" except FlatOut. Given what I've seen it do, and what I've seen the other sealants fail at, I switched to FlatOut for everything and haven't been disappointed yet.

It's why I went with them is it seems like not just glowing reviews, but the testimonials didn't seem manufactured like most brands.

I was too quick to blame them for something that it is highly likely was just a problem with the tube before I squirted their goo into it. I think that's because all the recommendations and praise started to set off my scammy sense.

I work in web development as an accessibility and efficiency consultant, and almost always the stuff laden with praise, media coverage, and "testimonial" are giant sleazy scams. Bootcrap, Failwind, React, Angular, Vue.js -- they all reek of being made by people unqualified to work with web technologies, used by people even less qualified to get suckered in by the propaganda and bald faced lies, and stuck in echo chambers where you're not allowed to say anything negative about anything... no matter how badly it's all swirling down the toilet. Thus all the lies and "popularity" means that when companies get prosecuted for violating US ADA, UK EQA, or similar laws around the globe, they refuse to believe the scams they swallowed hook, line, sinker, and a bit o' the rod is their real problem.

It has made me knee-jerk into thinking that when something goes wrong, it's probably the advertising and popularity being manufactured BS, and whatever tool or product is involved being a scam.

I need to ch-checkity-check myself on that more. I'm pretty sure now my issues were not flatout's fault. Especially since I completely missed one detail. The rear end had no problems and no liquid separation / excess liquid in the tube. If one tire was messed up and the other was not, it's probably not the additive's fault.

It's also riding way smoother with less (well, no) up-down oscillation since I switched to the WD tires, making me wonder if the Kenda's it came with are also... problematic.

 

[Stefan Mikes]

Jason: I hated the tubeless solution because of the hassle and dirt when replacing the tyres. Especially, tubeless is a hopeless solution if you replace tyres for the winter.
However, I appreciated the tubeless on my e-MTB on a long off-ride out in the wilderness. Some foresters paved a "gravel" road with quartzite (!!!) A bit of the mineral punctured my front wheel (even if the 2.6" downhill-rated tyre was very thick). I got a spray of the sealant over my bike and face!

I have found out I was not that far from a camping site, so I rode very slowly up there. As it seemed nobody could help me out there, I sadly sat on a tree-stump and waited. After a quarter, I produced my MTB minipump and started inflating the tyre. To my surprise, the pressure held! As it turned out, the sealant got out from the hole and did its work. I could continue my long ride and my day was saved! (Of course, I didn't repeat the quartzite road experience).

For some types of e-bikes, the tubeless solution is perfect. Especially if one does not need to cope with winters.

 

[Gionnirocket]

Jason: I hated the tubeless solution because of the hassle and dirt when replacing the tyres. Especially, tubeless is a hopeless solution if you replace tyres for the winter.
However, I appreciated the tubeless on my e-MTB on a long off-ride out in the wilderness. Some foresters paved a "gravel" road with quartzite (!!!) A bit of the mineral punctured my front wheel (even if the 2.6" downhill-rated tyre was very thick). I got a spray of the sealant over my bike and face!

I have found out I was not that far from a camping site, so I rode very slowly up there. As it seemed nobody could help me out there, I sadly sat on a tree-stump and waited. After a quarter, I produced my MTB minipump and started inflating the tyre. To my surprise, the pressure held! As it turned out, the sealant got out from the hole and did its work. I could continue my long ride and my day was saved! (Of course, I didn't repeat the quartzite road experience).

For some types of e-bikes, the tubeless solution is perfect. Especially if one does not need to cope with winters.

If it had been a tubed tire you probably would not have gotten a facial and the sealant may have still worked on the tube. So I'm assuming that the facial was a plus for you.

I avoid putting any kind of goo in my tires. Twice I have done so, & twice
the valve stem clogged up making it impossible to add air.

If you fill your tires with a compressor, give the tire a blast of air in before checking pressure or letting air out to blow the valve clear. You can even add a drop of water to the stem before doing so

I will sometimes put tubeless latex in a tube. I did that on a Ritche gravel bike yesterday. But then I put O-ring lube on and in the valve. Nothing sticks to O-ring lube.

It's like hot sauce.... "I put that s*it on everything "

But typically the valve stem fails are from the stringy fibrous pieces that get caught between the seal and it's seat

 

[Mike TowpathTraveler]

I've done it all. Bare tubes. Tubes with Slime. Tubes with Mr Tuffy liners. Tubeless with Orange Seal. Back to bare tubes and Tannus Armour, which I have been running with for about 2 years now.

Tubeless is a considerable investment of time and money. Time in having to tape the rims, a process in itself. Don't forget to get a couple of new rim strips, too. The Dyna Plug system is a must-have. So too are extra plugs. I think it's Blackburn who have come up with a plug for very big holes that the Dyna Plug can't fill. Sure wish I had those Blackburn plugs when I suffered a rear tire gash some 13 miles from home. Sealant blown everywhere on the bike. Even today, under the rear rack, there are still solidified pieces of Orange Seal. What to do? Being a fat tire and figuring more is always better than less, I used 8 oz of sealant in my tubeless set up. So, to disassemble that mess on the side of the road to try to fit my spare tube was going to be a slippery, gooey mess. Instead, I filled that gash with about every spare dyna plug I had, and miracle of miracles & riding very gingerly and slowly, I got home. Cleaned everything up, invested in the Tannus inserts and left tubeless behind.

No one particular method is above the rest. They all have their short comings and advantages. I can see tubeless working out great if the tire was built to a tougher standard, with more layers of belts, thicker treads and rubber depth. But that will never happen in an industry that builds with lightness and flexibility in mind.

These days, flats have been minimal in my riding as I have made a more concerted effort to watch for road debris in front of me. Riding on 4.0 inch wide fat tires makes you a magnet for every potential screw, nail, broken glass, sharp stone, construction debris and every other object inhabiting our road shoulders. A sharp lookout really works.

 

[m@Robertson]

Agreed with all that there is no one solution. I certainly don't use just one. I've even still got a bike using Tuffy. I am all done paying the ransom for Tannus Armour though. Have had three failures of installation. With that stuff your install experience depending on the tire tightness on the rim can vary from a doddle to a nightmare to impossible. Considering the manufacturer now acknowledges that Tannus will flatten out over time, and they recommend to stave this off to flatten your tires... I'm done with them.

I had figured that even thinned out Tannus was better than nothing and I was fine with that. It was the failed installations I got tired of. I think I use it successfully in a half dozen bikes but when it doesn't fit you are sitting on a $50 per tire life preserver.

 

[Jason Knight]

Some foresters paved a "gravel" road with quartzite (!!!)

As a kid growing up Taxachusetts it wasn't uncommon for a very rough granite -- streaked with labradorite -- to be used in paving driveways. It was so sharp and uneven you simply couldn't cross it on a bicycle without getting a puncture. It didn't help that they called it "gravel' when the smallest pieces were the size of the average person's pinky finger.

It wasn't all that great on car tires either until you had three or four good winters of laying down sand and salt to "even it out".
I asked why the blazes it was done, and the answer was simple. "It's cheaper than pavement and it looks nice" Of course it was cheap because it was all over the place if you dug down more than a foot as it was deposited in the "Pine Hills" by glacial action. When people talk about "gravel bikes" my brain still goes "The **** you say?!? Are you trying to kill yourself?" despite my now knowing better.

Form over function biting us in the backside. Every time someone says "oh but it looks nice" I have to choke back the urge to vomit. didn't even know gravel was supposed to be small pea-sized pieces of stone until I moved to New Hampshire. Because where I grew up "gravel' was 3" long sharp jagged razors of death. What people call gravel in the rest of the world, I grew up knowing as "pebbles" or "fill stones".

You ever take a fall on rough crushed granite? Sucks almost as bad as getting hit by a lawn dart, or finding out you have no balance/control at the ankles after you put on the "moon shoes". The '70's were a weird time.

 

[mschwett]

…

Form over function biting us in the backside. Every time someone says "oh but it looks nice" I have to choke back the urge to vomit. didn't even know gravel was supposed to be small pea-sized pieces of stone until I moved to New Hampshire. Because where I grew up "gravel' was 3" long sharp jagged razors of death. What people call gravel in the rest of the world, I grew up knowing as "pebbles" or "fill stones".
…

when people say “it’s cheaper than xxx and it looks nice” what they really mean is “it’s cheap and at least one person once said it wasn’t ugly so we can pretend we’re not doing it solely because it’s dirt cheap.”

you get what you pay for, almost always.