Originally Posted by
Chandne
I'm still using tubes on the road bike though have used tubeless and loved the ride feel. I'm probably going back to tubeless soon...mostly for the safety factor on fast downhills here and also for that supple ride feel. Tubeless still is best at lower pressures. On the MTB, I have been tubeless since around 2005. Gravel is all tubeless. It would be pretty dumb to use tubes here. You just need to learn how to do tubeless...there is technique involved and it is often more difficult to set up than gravel or MTB.
Interesting. I don't MTB, but I do road and gravel tubeless at various pressures, and never have associated setup difficulty with either discipline or pressure. Why do you think discipline is a relevant factor to setup ease?
For example, I run two pairs of AC Argent road wheels with +100psi pressures, most often 23c Schwalbe One of various generations, but also 23c Hutchinson Fusion5 Galactik. They are far-and-away the easiest of my 5 tubeless wheelsets to set up. The most difficult, to the point of surrender, have been lower pressure WTB i23 650b x 48c at 50psi and 700c Spinergy GX at 70psi with 35c rubber. The tires in both most difficult cases are Rene Herse models, on standard and one extralight casing.
From what I understand, setup issues are more to do with equipment design than discipline, though some of the issues I can see being related to discipline, of course. Take a tubeless tire casing which is not airtight, for example, and relies on sealant to retain air pressure. I can well imagine that low pressure applications might stress the sealant less than high pressure, allowing, perhaps, for a thinner layer of sealant to be effective.
Again, that's hypothetical and not my experience, so I'm curious to know what you see as the discipline-specific factors to ease of setup.