How-To: Set up Road Tubeless Tires

We’ve all got one cycling friend that swears tubeless is Bad Technology. God bless these early adopters and basement tinkerers: they tried tubeless when it was indeed unreliable tech, and helped us iterate toward the good products we have today.

These days, tubeless is a reliable solution if you do your homework, and ultimately can net you significantly more saddle time without needing to change a flat compared to running tubes. And a handful of trustworthy rolling resistance studies show it’s the fastest option on the market today—even over tubulars.

Folks seem to have two main concerns, which I’ll address below: Safety, and, Yucky.

Safety

Here’s the deal, pals: all tires can come off rims given poor setups and bad situations. Clincher tubes can explode (it happened to a teammate in a race!), perhaps at a rate of one in 1,000,000. Tubulars can roll off, even when glued by professional mechanics. Tubeless setups can seem like the worst of all options, but this reputation is exacerbated by horror stories that I’m pretty sure can be attributed to trying to make tubeless work with the wrong components, and for the wrong purposes. 

Commandment One: Run Lower Pressure

The science today flies in the face of what almost all of us were taught, and here is what it says: You should be running lower pressure than you think. How low? According to HED, the fastest option over tarmac if you weigh 170 lbs is 67 PSI. Yes, you read that correctly. The only time pressures above 100psi make any sense is on the boards, indoors. You’re officially welcome for this information, and you’re officially “old school” if you disagree. It’s science. 

So anyway—tubeless. Don’t try to run tubeless tires the same way you’ve run tube-type or tubular tires; and definitely run them at low pressure. Hed, for example, recommends never running tubeless tires on their purpose-built tubeless Vanquish rims above 65 psi. In our opinion: stick to 28c tires or bigger, which allow you to run a lower pressure and achieve the same (or better) rolling resistance results. Trying to make 23c tires and 90+ PSI work in a tubeless setup is a recipe for disaster or “bad luck.” 60 PSI may not feel fast, but in a majority of real-world roads, it is. 

Let me reiterate this: don’t try to make Tubeless Tires work above 75psi. Find a tire width that allows a lower pressure. 

Commandment Two: Use the Right Gear

Stick to gear that is designed from the ground up to be tubeless. As an example: my hookless CX rims don’t even work with tubes. They’ve got prominent lips to keep the tire from decompressing (the bead going IN is the real problem, not the bead blowing OUT). Have a look at the profile of the rim, and inspect them in the shop. Can you feel a ridge that will hold the bead against the sidewall of the rim? If not, these are not truly tubeless-ready. 

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While we’re here, if you have a rim-brake bike, I’ll advise you to keep those tubes in and walk away. The >30mm-wide rims that we can use with disc brakes allow for even lower pressures, and the shape makes tubeless work better. You can stop reading this article now, I guess, and be happy with your cool, now retro-tech bike.

Finally: get yourself a compressor pump or a compressed air chamber. The JoeBlow Torpedo, for example, or the Airshot. These things work great. The reason why is you need to seat the bead of the tire snugly in the rim, and this usually takes some oomph that only a compressor pump can provide. Sometimes you’ll need to add a little soap and water to make things slide in on extra tight tires or wide rims. Honestly, don’t even try on a regular pump.

Commandment Three: For Now, Stick With the Establishment

I hate to say this, but for now, go with the big, serious tire manufacturers if you’re going tubeless. More quantity = more experience. Bigger companies also tend to be risk-averse, so in a lot of cases, you can trust that they’ve tested it to the point that even the lawyers are fine with it. Conti, Schwalbe, Vittoria—these types of folks.

Commandment Four: Pay Attention

Be fussy and detail-oriented in your prep and setup. Go slow the first 10 times you install tubeless tires. The taping phase is ultra-important. Is it tight enough? Probably not. Do it again. 

Commandment Five: Put Some More Sealant In There

I promise you, you’re not using enough. Five times out of ten, this is the problem. The other five? You taped badly. 

Yucky

Sealant is gross. It’s basically thin, wet glue. 

It’s not going to get all over your living room

Generally speaking, though, you won’t have to deal with it much...if you pay attention to my five commandments of tubeless tires above. The people who have sealant all over their living room were probably trying to make a regular clincher tire into a tubeless tire on a regular rim (even though they’ll never admit it). Also, just do it in your garage or in the shower. Easy clean up. 

It’s not going to be a pain in the ass on the road

Most punctures will seal right up without you noticing. The ones that don’t can be sealed with a Dynaplug. All the same, bring a tube and a tire lever; you can pour out the extra sealant if you run into a real disaster, and in the end, you won’t end up any dirtier than a normal wet-day flat repair. 

How-To

Mise en Place

Get everything out that you’re going to need. Lay out newspaper and organize your workspace. 

Tape and scissors should be within reach. 

Valve core remover and extra valve cores near each other.

A metal bowl with a clean shop rag, and soapy water. 

A spray bottle of isopropyl alcohol and another clean rag. 

Tires, sealant, and whatever injector/measurement device you’re planning to use, ready to go. 

Slow down. Have a beer. Try NA beer from Athletic Brewing – it’s good, and TBD25 gets you 25% off your first order. Bet you didn’t see that ad coming, did you?

Clean!

Get everything really, really clean. Remove your old tape. Knock/brush whatever dirt/grime you’ve accumulated off the rims, inside and out. Soap up and hose down. Dry, then wipe down with the isopropyl.

Tape

Tubeless tape is fragile stuff, and specific to the width of your rim. I like Stan’s tape – it’s yellow, so you can see where it is and where it isn’t. Keep your oily, grubby fingers off the rim bed and off the sticky part of the tape, start opposite the valve, and slowly apply the tape, taking care to gently push it into the center channel. All of these tapes are relatively stiff, and prone to lengthwise splitting if you’re not careful. 

To that point – I’m not sure if this is science, but you want to be sure the tape is mostly conforming to the profile of the rim before you apply the tire, but you don’t need to smooth out every single bubble. But be absolutely sure you press the edges of the tape into the crevice between the bead seat and the sidewall of the rim. This will prevent it from getting peeled off during tire installation.

Valve

To the point about the lengthwise splitting, avoid using a knife to make the hole in the tape for your valve. This has a tendency to create way too big a hole in the tape and you’ve got to start over. Bummer. Use something with a small, sharp point, like a pick. If you can, use the valves that your rim manufacturer makes – that way you know they’ll match their contour.

Sometimes, cores get clogged up. I haven’t found a way to clean them out, so be prepared to swap in a new one over time.

Install the tire, but, forget what you know

Start away from the valve, and keep the bead in the channel. Normally when we’re putting tires on with tubes, we’re taking care to not pinch the tube under the bead. In this case, really pinch the bottom of the tire so it drops down away from the edge of the rim until you get both sides of the tire on there.

Do a dry fit

Inflate the tire with your compressed air thingy of choice before you put sealant in. This way you know the thing isn’t going to blow up, and you can get the beads up out of the center channel so you don’t leak sealant everywhere. Once everything is looking good, deflate the tire, and pull the core out. I’ve found that just yanking the core from a pressurized tire will cause the tire (sometimes) to fall off the bead seats. Take it slow. Inject your sealant through the empty valve, replace the core, and pump it up again to the top of the recommended tire or rim pressure recommendation, whichever is lower.

Note: you can’t do this with Stan’s Race sealant, because it will clog the valve. Instead, you install the tire most of the way, and then in the small gap between the tire and the rim that remains before you seal the whole thing up, you pour in the sealant. While ensuring that the sealant doesn’t leak out (some will leak out), you quickly seal up the tire and inflate as normal. This is required for Stan’s Race, but you can do this for any other sealant. I don’t recommend this, because...yucky.

Make sure it really gets in there

The sealant is there for three reasons.

1. To fill small gaps between the tire bead and the rim

2. To fill in tiny holes in the tire casing and the rim tape

3. To seal punctures that happen on the road

Some tires “drink” sealant: they have such porous casings that they will soak up sealant, enabling them to become airtight. WTB and Compass are a couple brands that do this. You may need to keep adding air for a few hours before the sealant gets pressed all the way into all the gaps that need sealing (1) and (2) above. In order to help it along, spin the wheel every so often, and if you notice anywhere that’s a real trouble spot, tilt the wheel in such a way that you know liquid sealant will be covering that spot. It should sort itself out pretty quickly, but give it an overnight rest to be sure.

Add a little sealant after this process is over to be sure you have enough for (3). 

You should be done. Go ride!

Add more sealant once in a while

All sealants are different, but they generally go bad in six-ish months. The best way to check is to spin the wheel and listen for liquid sealant. The tire staying inflated does not mean you have liquid sealant – it just means that there’s a good, airtight bond and you did a good job setting up your tires.