Trouble seating hookless Gravelkings - need advice!!
 

Hi! It's my first time trying tubeless/hookless and I've hit a snag at the very beginning of my journey: I can't get my tire beads to sit on the wheel! :(

I've got some LightBicycle WR36s wheels with Panaracer Gravelking SS 700x32C tires. The wheels are hookless, with no access holes for the spokes, i.e. they don't need tape. The tires are listed as tubeless compatible on the Panaracer site and Enve says they're hookless compatible as well.
https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...d8e9beed04.jpg

I tried seating them (without rim tape) and had no success, so I took them to the local bike shop where they've got a pump with a pressure chamber. They weren't able to get the tires seated, either (they tried up to 6bar pressure). :(

I'm not sure what to do and am hoping someone here may have some suggestions/advice! Do you think putting 2~3 layers of rim tape on will help?

Thanks!

EDIT: I should say, I don't think they're too loose. On the contrary, the beads seem to want to stay in the center channel and not come up. I've tried to massage them up from the outside with my thumbs but they won't go up. In any case, the result is that there is no seal anywhere around the tire/rim so the air immediately comes out of the gap without causing the tire to inflate at all.

At the LBS they popped on a pair of 700x28C Schwalbe Pro Ones and they seated immediately so it's not the wheel/valves.

No experience with tubeless, much less your combo, but if it is this much trouble fully equipped at an LBS then think
what might happen if you flat out in the boonies with dodgy cell coverage. Either give up and use tubes or try those
Schwalbe Pro Ones.

Just for grins, have you tried ether?

I wouldn't run tires you couldn't seat.

It would be unusual for Gravelkings to be too tight. Loose or too loose is the norm IME. For this, a few extra wraps of tape can help. Pulling the valve core for full flow can help. Using a spare innertube to wrap the tire & hold the beads closer can mitigate air loss. A rubber tipped air blower can sometimes work better than a prestaflator.

Edit: In a case like yours (& mine, since I run troublesome GK's too,) I've often wondered if bulking up the center well with a wrap of Velox before the usual tubeless tape so the airloss isn't so great on inflation. You could try & report back the results.

Too tight is another matter I've never come across.

There is something wrong somewhere. Since the LBS already managed to get some other tires seated, I suggest an equivalent tire from another brand & save the Gravelkings for another time.

This technique works for me:


I can seat GK SK's with a regular floor pump. When you get close to half of a bead seated using the tire lever, the half of the bead that's not seated is tight on the rim, so it holds air well enough pop in place.

My rims aren't hookless.

Another thought: if the rim has a matt surface, that might be impeding the initial air capture, so one layer of tape might fix that.

Put a tube in for a week and then try it.

You have both beads of the tire in the rim and simply can't get them to seat? That's going to be a function of how much volume of air you can blow into the tire. Many floor pumps and tankless air compressors won't be able to and even a air compressors with a tank might fail if it doesn't have a hose and chuck that allow for high volumes of air to pass at a very high rate.

Try putting a length of nylon cord around the circumference of the tire and tightening it like a tourniquet. That may spread to beads of the tire far enough out to keep some of the air from escaping so fast as you put it in.

The ether trick does work, but I'd not do that with a bicycle tire. And certainly it should not be performed indoors or by someone that has never done it before! <grin> < sort of like ad's that tell you not to take their medicine if you are allergic to it. How would you know if you don't take it? >

Been down this road far too many times. Ditch the GK's and find something else that works better on your hookless rims. Or install tubes.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone. I appreciate it. Being my first attempt, I was/am a bit too timid to put too much effort into getting the tires seated but am glad to hear your advice and (partial) success stories.

I will try some of the methods mentioned (no ether!) and see what I can do. However, I do agree with the comment about not running a tire that won't easily seat (don't want to get stuck out on a trip with a tire you can't seat!) so I won't go to extremes to get it seated. If it does seat, I'll let it rest/stretch for a few days, remove it, and see if I can re-seat it easily. If not I will find another tire and hope for better luck!

Thanks, again.

(To be fair to the LBS - it was my first time there and they are a small, roadie focused outfit, primarily dealing with tubed and narrow tires (i.e. not my wider, tubeless, hookless tires). All we attempted was using the pump w/chamber and letting the tires hang overnight. I think that the soapy water or additional tape wrap ideas may do the trick)

1. Let the tires take shape with a tube beforehand. Warm tires are easier. 2. Always(!) remove the valve core. 3. Use soapy water - you don’t need a lot. 4. Lever the bead up onto the shoulder at least 1/2 way around on each side. The more - the better. For 75% of tires, that last step makes it doable with a hand pump. Watch how Syd does it:

I also had a lot of problems mounting GKs. I tried them on three different rims and they were hard on all so its not just the rim-tire combo. I also took them to the LBS who also could not seat them using a pile of tricks like in the above videos.

In the process I developed a theory of why they are hard to seat: the rubber is much more "grippy" than other tire rubber and so they are not sliding over to the rim to seal like other tires do when you give them a little pressure. I don't think they are too tight or too loose, they go on easy like they are loose but adding a ton of rim tape didn't help so being too loose didn't seem to be the problem.

I personally found a trick to seat them every time which is as far as I know my own trick. Take the wheel in your hands, put two thumbs on the top of the tread and index fingers on the sides, and use the sides of your index fingers to pinch the tire and pull the tire toward the side of the rim. Go around the whole wheel 2-3 times doing this, alternating hands left-right-left-right and moving it a couple inches around each time. Then, keep in mid-air but attach pump and pump. The tire needs to be completely dry for this to work, if you soaped it there will be no way to do this. The reason why this works is it is getting the tire bead right up against the rim so it will be less leaky right at the start and will be able to pressurize. Since the rubber is so grippy the bead will stay by the rim when you put it there -- taking advantage of the grippy rubber instead of working against it.

Another thing that might solve this issue is to soap the tire bead, that should negate the too-grippy rubber problem. I never tried it though.

A week might be overkill, but it worked flawlessly for me with difficult Rene Herse tires. Didn't even need to use the pressure chamber on the pump.

Their FAQ on the subject:

https://www.renehersecycles.com/tubeless-faq/

The idea is the tube presses the tape down and the sidewalls against the rim. Then you break the seal on one side, remove the tube, install the tubeless valve, and then pump air in until it properly sets up. In my case I went from unmountable tires to a tire that snapped right back into position just with normal pumping. I didn't even need to use the compression chamber on my tubeless-tire-mounting Bontrager pump. I just pumped it up like any old tire, and it worked. Then when you have the bead properly seated all around, take out the valve core, pour in the sealant, and pump it up again.

The FAQ link posted above helps trouble-shoot additional problems, should you encounter them. I suspect Rene Herse tires are probably harder to mount than Gravel Kings. The less supple the tire, the easier it is to mount.

I think you're probably right with this theory. They are damn grippy - you can't even rotate the tire around after putting one bead on the rim in order to position the tire labels where you'd like (if you're in to that, of course) -- the tires are just too damn grippy on the rim. Not like some of the other tires I seem that are quite easy to reposition.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're both just as difficult as the other due to the "grippiness" idea, given that Panaracers and Rene Herses are both manufactured by the same company in Japan. With luck, what works for one with work for the other. Thanks! :)

OK, I am curmudgeon but this much hassle with rims and tires designed for tubeless is why stay with tubes and tubular

Reading this (and about a billion more) I really don't get why people say tubular are too much of a hassle? compared to this easy.

any way back to regular programming and get off my lawn
:50: :giver: :50:

Worth noting that if you use LB rims with no tape and tubeless tires, you are gonna have a HELL of a time getting the tires off. The bead retention ridge is really square. Having TL tape does 3 (good) things:

1) reduces the amount of friction between tire and rim. This mitigates the problem at hand.
2) creates a smoother path for the tire to come over the bead retention ridge when you want to remove the tire
3) increases the diameter of the rim, which improves fit/air retention/security.

I'm not entirely certain where the aversion to TL tape comes from. If you buy tape that's the right size, it's really hard to mess it up. DT swiss tape that's inner width + 2 or 3 mm wide works really well. So 27mm for you. Add 2mm for hooked rims (since inner width is measured between the hooks).

Also... this problem has absolutely nothing to do with hooks.