nun

I'm going on tour soon and want to minimize punctures. I don't want to make any radical changes to my setup on such short notice so I'm not going tubeless, but I am considering using sealant in my inner tubes. It seems like a "no-brainer". Does anyone have experience of this or recommendations... I'm looking at 32mm Continental Gator skins, with either Slime presta inner tubes or Muc Off sealant in my existing tubes.

Tourist in MSN

I added sealant to some presta tubes several years ago for one trip. It is my recollection that I used tubes that had a removeable presta valve core, some tubes do not have a removable core. And I used Slime sealant which is water soluble so I could clean out the valve stem before replacing valve cores. Only used it for one trip. But that was eight years ago, I do not recall any more detail than that. You should get advice from someone with more recent experience than me.

BikeLite

It seems I have read threads in bicycle mechanics forum.

Germany_chris

I'll say the same thing in this thread I said when this was brought up in the road forum.. I've used sealant in tubulars and it worked but I have not tried with clinchers.

Ghazmh

I have sealant in my inner tubes on my touring bike which is now my commuter bike. No punctures that I’m aware of. I did the same thing in my road bike a few years ago. I had a puncture from a nail which was way too big for sealant to be of any use. In that case it made a big mess and coated the brake track with slippery sealant.

timdow

You might consider a highly puncture resistant tire rather than a light-duty tire and sealant. I like the Schwalbe marathon Plus, which has awesome puncture protection, but at the cost of weight and stiffness. I do not know how much a light tire with sealant in it is lighter that a heavier duty tire, but the weight penalty of the heavier tire is at least mitigated somewhat, and may be erased by the sealant. I would double-down on a heavier duty tire if your plans include loaded touring.

staehpj1

I will say that it probably doesn't work as well as sealant in a tubeless tire. I suspect the tube is too flexible for it to work the same. Also the tube may move slightly in the tire casing so sealing around a foreign object like a thorn is tougher.. That is my conclusion based on having tried slime tubes and havinge used tubless. No real definite science there.

If you do try it, I strongly suggest using a water based sealant that is easy to clean up after. I know that the tube we tried that had sealant in them were a messy proposition. We quickly decided they weren't worth the mess. With a different sealant the mess would likely have been much more manageable. I know that the sealant in my Stans tubeless setup has been fine in that regard.

I will also say that out of pure laziness I did put some Stans in a wheel barrow tire that had a tube with a leak. That was a year or two ago. I have to pump it up now and then, but have yet to actually fix it. It still leaks but much slower. It gets little use and so the sealant likely doesn't get to the hole often enough.

andrewclaus

At road tire pressures, the sealant will only work on a pinhole. Anything larger and, as said above, you'll have a mess, a rooster tail of sealant on you and the bike. The sealant may also gum up the valve stem, to the point where air can't be added. And you won't be able to patch a larger hole due to the contamination of the sealant. I volunteer at a non-profit shop, where our mission is to reuse and recycle, but any tube that comes in with sealant goes right in the trash.

Those Gatorskins will protect you from most of the small stuff.

robow

May I just add that if you seek additional flat resistance that your Gator's don't inherently have, then you could also try tire liners such as Rhinodillos or Mr. Tuffy, if your tire-rim combination will allow for it (a lot less mess)

Tourist in MSN

That is a good point, I have had good luck with tire liners in up to 37mm wide tires.

nun

I’m surprised that sealant in inner tubes isn’t more common in the touring community. The mess should be a lot less than with tubeless because the sealant is contained in the tube. Also being a bit slower isn’t a big concern for touring. There are a couple of positive videos on YouTube so I’ll give it a go and report back.

Tourist in MSN

I know you have done a lot of touring, I assume mostly on skinny tires. My touring has mostly been on tires between 37mm and 57mm. Of all my touring, I have only had one puncture during a bike tour. That puncture was on a Schwalbe Marathon (with Greenguard) 40mm wide tire, it was a big staple, the kind of staple that you sometimes see holding wooden furniture together. That said, I average one puncture a year, typically from riding around near home, mostly broken glass.

I do not think I have ever had a pinch flat on a tire that is 32mm or wider, and I usually run pretty low pressure on the front.

With my average rate of punctures, it is easier to just carry a tube and a self adhesive patch kit on the bike when riding around near home. On a bike tour, I carry two spare tubes. And I just do not worry about it.

I do not live in a desert area with thorns. That probably explains my lack of punctures.

I did a van supported ACA trip in Big Bend several years ago. Believe it or not, nobody had a puncture, but one person had a flat when a tube came loose from a valve stem. I did however make the mistake of riding my bike into the campsite, off pavement. In maybe 100 feet, I picked up a lot of thorns and spent about 5 minutes removing them, took the photo below. After removing them, I carried my bike to the pavement instead of rolling it on the ground.



A friend of mine did Southern Tier on a skinny tire road bike, and in the Southwest where there are a lot of thorns, he had a lot of flats. I think he had 7 punctures in one day in that part of the country. Another guy on that same ride had his touring bike with 35mm tires, I think he had a total of 4 punctures from Pacific to Atlantic.

djb

last year I helped someone who had crashed, I suspect his really old tires had popped off the rim going down a downhill when he hit a bump (really old tires) because when I checked out his tube, it had quite a big gash in it (big pinch flat).
The weird thing was that in the tire and all around the tube was this slimey stuff, I finally figured out that the tube in there was a tube with sealant in it. I'll admit that I did not know that tubes with sealant in them existed.
The sealant in this tube certainly didnt help with the big holes in that tube, but maybe helps with smaller stuff--and like I said, I strongly suspect he had slightly overinflated these old, gumwall tires and that they were cheapo tires 20 years ago and had gotten stretched and sloppy on the rim (Ive seen this before with old old tires when helping people a few times, the tire bead just clinging onto the rim by its fingernails sort of thing)

I dunno nun, do you really get flats often? Touch wood here, but I get them so infrequently, it's just not an issue for me.
but I guess it really does depend on where you are riding, we just dont have thorns around here, and good tires that arent worn just plain work really well for me overall.

I'm certainly game to try tubeless at one point, but as you yourself mentioned, there certainly are a bunch of tricks etc to pick up for living with tubeless, or at least to have practised dealing with (plugs, reseating a tire if it burbs off the rim or loses so much air and sealant from a larger hole or gash) but from all the tubeless reading I have done, the whole reseating thing can vary greatly with a specific tire-rim combo.

HelpSingularity 

I run Schwalbe marathon Plus tires on my touring/commuter bike on the mean streets of Southern California. I've not ridden out to the desert/goathead thorn areas since I mounted these 2 years ago so I don't have first hand knowledge of how they fare with goathead thorns. But so far zero flats in an urban environment.

I have used slime tubes in the desert previously with different tires very successfully. I would hit a goathead thorn patch and get a half dozen needle-like punctures and the tube promptly became airtight again. The sealant worked like a charm.

So the TLDR; get Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires, if you are still getting a lot of thorn flats then use sealant. That's my advice anyway!

staehpj1

That wasn't my experience, but maybe it wasn't a fair comparison since the tubeless setup was on a lower pressure fatter tire and the tube setup was a slime tube. I recall the slime tube as a huge fail. Plenty of flats, super messy, patches didn't hold and so on. The tubeless is on my mountain bike and is pretty much trouble free. If you get any sealant on hands or anything else it washes off with water. The slime tubes were on three bikes with 700x32 tires on touring bikes on the Trans America. We after a bit of failing threw them away without trying to patch them anymore. I think we also gave away a spare one we had. We didn't find them all that flat free.

Your putting a water based sealant in a regular tube may be a better option. I wonder if you will have patching issues like we did. Let us know how it goes.

Tourist in MSN

If your patches did not stick to the punctured slime tubes, perhaps you needed to wipe off the tubes with a solvent like alcohol. The slime may have left a residue, alcohol should remove a residue from a water based sealant. Sometimes I wipe off a tube with rubbing alcohol before I patch it just as a cleaner and the alcohol evaporates much faster than water, even when rubbing alcohol is a water alcohol mix.

staehpj1

We were on the TA and not carrying alcohol. I guess the little packets with alcohol wipes would be handy for that.. We did sand the area pretty thoroughly. Perhaps some alcohol would have done the trick. We figured that the slime ate the patch after working its way through the hole after the patch was installed. We were probably wrong. We were unimpressed with the tubes in other ways enough to not bother trying much with the patches, They were messy, heavy, and seemed to flat pretty often anyway.

It was at the time we were first exposed to goat head thorns. So we were easily frustrated.

HelpSingularity 

I feel your pain, brother. It is so distressing to look at your tire and see a dozen or more goatheads sticking on your tire while it is going flat.

Or you start to gently pull them out and then one of them starts hissing.

For me this is where a sealant in the tube shines. But I also have found, like you, that patching can become problematic. This is where one might have to become creative, like the saying goes: Improvise, adapt, overcome.

I have never used tubeless, I'm the Millard Fillmore of bicycle technology, but I guess this kind of situation is where tubeless tires shine.

HelpSingularity 

This is where the miracle of the Schwalbe Marathon Plus comes into play. It might not be impervious to goathead thorns but it shrugs off just about anything else the road is going to throw at you.

irwin7638

I use Flat Attack sealant in the tubes all the time, not just touring. It's a simple solution to flats everywhere. Flat Attack is made to be used in tubes and is viable up to 5 years so it does not need the periodic refreshing that other sealants need. I've had 3 flats on the road in the past 4 years riding between 6 and 7K miles a year. With most punctures the tire just looses a little air, goes soft, I check to make sure nothing is stuck in the tire, add air and ride on. It's a real game saver. There are some advantages to tubeless, but most are for competitive cyclists, I just wanted the flat protection, adding sealant to the tubes provides that.

Marc

staehpj1

Yeah, no thanks. They are not for me. I love a light supple tire. A supple side wall is a joy, providing a nice responsive ride and road feel. The Plus is the opposite of that. I tried them for a while, took them off and sold them. If you don't mind the weight or the ride feel then they might be a great choice.

Tourist in MSN

I carry a one ounce bottle of 90 percent rubbing alcohol, disinfect my finger before pricking it for my blood sugar meter. One ounce will go a long way when you are careful with it. You are fortunate you do not have a reason to carry any.

When I did the ACA Big Bend trip, one gal in the group was unhappy with her disc brake performance, she wiped off the rotor with rubbing alcohol and later said it was much improved.

staehpj1

On the majority of my trips since then I have used an alcohol stove. So I would have had alcohol on those trips. I assume the Yellow Heet I used would suffice for the purpose. Less sure about it, but I'd imagine white gas (coleman fuel) would do as well. So I'd be covered if I took the Whisperlite or the SVEA. Still I am not likely to use slime tubes again. Not sure if the extra effort is necessary with Stans sealant or similar or whether it is a good idea for general patching of tubes without sealant. I have always just hit the latter with sandpaper.

djb

well this topic certainly touches on the whole ride feel advantage of tubeless--but of course I have not experienced yet, so just from reading.
I can only equate it to perhaps riding with tires that are more supple and give a much nicer ride and roll overall, and thats what they say tubeless feels like--but I am sure that the individual tire itself plays a part also, using a super stiff tough tire tubeless (if there are any) must still have the ride quality associated with a very stiff sidewall, disregardless of if there is a tube in it or not.

I'm really not looking forward to riding in thorn country one day

Nun, if you ever do try out tubes with sealant, it stands to reason to experiment with fiddling with it from the mess angle and possible patching, because lets face it, getting a flat is often from a small hidden piece of wire or whatever, so a small hole will get plugged up but then if the offending thing is still there undetected, it will put in another hole very soon after, which will release sealant again.

HelpSingularity 

I am hip to what you are saying. On my 2 sporty bikes I have sporty, fun tires. But on my touring/commuter, where I put a premium on absolute positive reliability, those big ol' clod hoppers have been serving me well. As long as I'm riding by myself I don't really notice the performance hit. It's kinda like riding a Schwinn Varsity, heavy, steel rims and all but it has a certain charm all its own.