Originally Posted by
HardyWeinberg
I have a tubeless setup on my nice weather bike. For me it's an attempt to make roadie-type tires (schwalbe one) rather than hard-ass marathons work on the road conditions I face. It works pretty well.
I have a couple of tears in the rear tire that when they open spray sealant for a while before eventually plugging it up. If I were using tubes, I would have ditched that tire by now. Actually I am going to ditch it anyway, the sooner the replacement comes in the mail the better, and it's only about a 1000 miles. But in addition to the large tears, there are a zillion tiny punctures that would have messed my day up but they just seal and I keep going. So, not great lifespan for that rear tire but I have saved a lot of time on the road patching tubes and looking for sharps that need to be definitively removed before I can get back to rolling.
The spraying sealant from the big holes is a spectacle. But it also sticks to the frame and brake and haven't found what else yet, as well as to my legs (sticky latex not so much fun to pull out in the shower). If my front tire sprayed like that I would be unhappy about it shooting sealant into my headset.
I had a nice 1/4" slice in one tire. The sealant sealed just fine at first. A few days later I hit the levee roads, with golf ball sized gravel. The tire flexed enough to pop open the cut and spray sealant everywhere. It finally sealed again, only to pop back open the next time I took that route.
I ended up using a larger tube patch on the inside of the tire. I let it set overnight and mounted it with fresh sealant the next day. That was probably 700 miles or so ago, and I haven't had a problem since.
As far as tire longevity goes, my first two sets of Specialized Renegade Controls only lasted me about 1000-1200 miles a set, and that's with rotating them.
This last set of Kenda Kozmik Lite I SCT DTC tires are still going strong after, I think, over 3500 miles.