NoTubes Tire Sealant Brings the Best Out of Tubeless Wheelsets

I'm a weird sort of mountain biker. I hate buying new stuff. As long as my bike is reliable, fits well and isn't too heavy, I'm really pretty happy.

Tubeless tires were very low on my list of "new bike stuff." I only wound up with them because they came on my Gary Fisher Cake 2 DLX. For the longest time, I insisted on continuing to use tubes. But I have to be honest - the Bontrager Race wheelset that came stock on the Fisher never seemed to like tubes. The tire always had a pronounced bounce in its roll.

I was tired of that, and decided to take the plunge to full-on tubeless use. The Bontrager manual insists that you have to use sealant with this wheelset. I grabbed a pair of 2-ounce bottles of NoTubes tire sealant and got to work.

This means ripping the tires off, cleaning them up and actually soaping up the beads a bit. I fixed one side of the bead, installed the UST Tubeless Valve Stem into the valve hole, squirted the sealant in and popped the remaining bead onto the rim. Then, I aired the tire up to 60 PSI - right when it hit that number, there was a loud ping indicating that the bead had sealed to the rim. I backed the pressure off to my usual 42 PSI and repeated on the remaining wheel. I spun each wheel, noticing a much smoother tire roll. No more hop!

I was pretty eager for my next ride. The tubeless setup seemed to have less rolling resistance - possibly because the tube "bump" was no longer there to slow me down. It seemed to be that the sealant is slightly lighter than a tube, also. It seemed I could spin the wheels up to speed just a bit quicker.

Aside from that, the NoTubes sealant really seems to make the tires impervious to most punctures. On a recent ride, I heard the dreaded hiss of air seeping from a tire five times. With my old tubed set-up, I would've had to patch or replace a tube each time. Instead, I just found the offending item (in each case, a big cactus spike), spun the hole to the 6 o'clock position on the wheel, waited for it to seal and used my pump to bring the pressure back up. And yes, you can get tubes with sealant. But you pay a weight penalty, and all the weight is concentrated on the outside of the wheel where it matters the most.

So here's the bottom line from this old-school semi-retrogrouch: There's a lot of new-fangled bike stuff out there that I just don't cotton to. But tubeless wheelsets and tires have earned my appreciation.