spinconn

I am an old guy who rides recreationally, never raced, never trained seriously and never had an top end bike. I ride a Giant Contend these days and I thought I would try an upgrade to my tires and tubes so I bought and installed Continental GP5000 tires and Vittoria competition latex tubes. After a little over 100 miles, I got a flat on the front. I changed the tube and went to patch the punctured tube but could not find a puncture. But when I put air into it to find the puncture i did get a balloon like bulge. About a week and another 100 miles later the same thing happened to the rear tire. I found the same result. This time I switched the tires to Vittoria Rubino Pro and guess what? A repeat performance, this time with the rear wheel first and the front wheel later. These are 700c X 32 tires and I ran them at various pressures from 70/65 down to 57/53 as I was experimenting with the whole larger tire, lower pressure, lower rolling resistance theory.

I then switched over to my less expensive Conti butyl race tubes, running the same pressure ranges and riding the same routes for several hundred miles with no issues.

My first thought was I pinched the tubes during installation, but they all ran fine for several rides before going flat. I then thought there might be a rim defect, but the balloon was at different locations on the tube for all 4 tubes, and it wouldn't be likely to occur with both front and rear wheel. I would also think a product defect would cause the balloon to occur at the same location on each tube. What is going on here?

Jughed

I tried latex tubes with my GP5000’s.

screwed up putting both of them in, pinches, parts of the tubes popping out of the beads… I tried to inflate them a small amount before installing. Ended up popping both of them and putting in my old regular tubes, over 1000 miles with no issues.

They are a flat pain the the arse. I can’t imagine changing one on the side of the road.

HTupolev

The herniations are normal, latex tubes just do that if you start to pressurize them outside of a tire.

If there wasn't an obvious penetrating object and you don't remember pinching, you might need to shove the tube underwater to look for bubbles, or else scrap it.

Check the bond between the black valve stem rubber and the pink tube rubber, Vittoria has had some issues there.

drlogik 

Latex tubes require more diligence and care to install, keep inflated and repair and/or change on the road than butyl tubes. Latex will not take any abuse. If they are handled carefully, installed carefully, they will provide a truly remarkable smooth ride on high end tires, especially the "Open Tubular" type tires by Challenge and Velo.

If you try to pump up a latex tire to see if it has a pin hole, you'll get that ballooning effect. Do it the old fashioned way. Pump slightly to fill the tire and submerge it in your sink full of water and look for bubbles. I ride both latex and butyl and I almost never have problems but I do treat latex tubes differently.

One last thing, do not use tools, tire irons or anything else to install the tube or the tire onto the rim. And, when inflating from install, only pump about 10lbs of air, work the tire around the bead, pump to 20 lbs, repeat and ensure the tube is fully INSIDE the tire and not poking out or visible when looking between the bead and the rim. Pump to about 40 lbs and check again. 60lbs, check again until you get it to pressure.

I actually get to 60 lbs and if all is good I leave the tire over night and pump to pressure that next day. It's my way to validate the tire and tube are installed correctly. If you have a flat tire by morning, as I have once in a while, you did something wrong.

Russ Roth

Latex also looses a large amount of air within a couple days, you have to fill them every other day to keep them at proper pressure. If you wait the typical time span for a rubber tube to fill them you'll hop on feeling that they've gone flat. I run latex tubes in my oldest kid's race bike, started last year, and every 3 months I add in a bit of orange tubeless sealant, that's had the bonus of not needing to air them up for 3 days instead of 2, but its also meant no flats for for 1.5 years.

chaadster

As an aside, there are ZERO reasons to run latex instead of TPU in 2023.

rsbob 

These work just fine in my Conti 5000s

LarrySellerz

Hearing numerous reports of balooning tubes recently, I bet they are thinning the rubber to save on production costs or maybe to sell gatorskin tires.

tFUnK

Ran Vittoria latex tubes from 2014-2018 ish. Had the occasional balloon but not on every single one. Not an issue when installed in a tire, obviously.

They do pinch easily. They've taught me to be super careful when mounting, a practice I carry today even though I only ride TPU and butyl tubes more. Latex also stretches over time: tubes that were previously installed in a 25mm tire stretched to a point where it would get pinched too easily when mounting inside a 23mm tire.

With respect to TPU, I do think latex was more supple even if TPU is lighter. I don't know that I could tell any difference in rolling resistance but I've read latex has less.

With latex, on tires that have incurred some cuts, I've found that the latex creeps through the cuts where a butyl tube does not. To the point that you can blow a tube as you pump it up to pressure. On a Conti GP 4 Season tire with those textured sidewalls, I've literally seen the latex poke out from the sidewalls as I was pumping the tire up, culminating in an explosion.

chaadster

That depends on who you believe, which tubes and tires you use, and/or what’s statistically significant variance.

Schwalbe says their tests find Crr the same between the two.

BicycleRollingResistance says they found latex lower by very low margins, like .2w or .4w, but IMO, obfuscated the findings by averaging the results from three different tires. Obviously, at the very least that means the results were very mixed, but may also reveal the limited ability of their testing protocol and equipment. In other words, can .2w or .4w be trusted to be real or is that kind of variance statistically insignificant?

wheelreason

If you put 90 lbs in them out of the tire they 'll all do that, try it if you don't believe me...