Originally Posted by
tFUnK
Another thing to point out is that if your tires get cut up, there is a chance for the latex tube to creep out of the holes through the casing, resulting in blowouts. I've had latex tubes squeeze out of porous sidewalls, even.
I have a hard time believing that. Do you have photos of latex tubes herniating out of a fully-intact sidewall? Totally excluding rubber from the sidewalls is about as porous as it gets, and yet, there's extensive history proving that it works in the form of raw-sidewall track tubulars. The only latex herniations I've ever seen have been on sidewall cuts large enough to merit addressing regardless of air retention scheme.
I think the worry about latex tube durability is generally overblown. Latex tubes perform poorly in plunger puncture testing, but it's not obvious to me that this has any real relationship with how flats develop on the road. If anything, when I started switching from butyl to latex, my flat rate went
down.
They get pinched so easily during install.
Only if you pinch them. It's not like the tubes pinch themselves. Just put a bit of air into the tube so that it holds its shape before install. Then, after getting the tire over the rim, check the bead for pinches before inflating to high pressure. These are things you should be doing even with butyl tubes to make the install easier.
Even if you insist on using tire levers to get the bead over, the latex tube need not be damaged. Just pull the lever out before bottoming it out within the rim well. This is fairly easy to do with thin wide levers like Schwalbe, although admittedly, it's trickier to do with pointy levers.
I've found that they also tend to stretch over time, so a 23mm tube, after fitting to a 25mm tire, may become too large to easily fit back into a 23mm tire.
In my experience, this is a real phenomenon, but not unique to latex. Just about any inner tube shouldn't be used in a wide tire if you hope to easily fit it into a narrower tire at a later date.