Zaskar

This tire is in great shape. It was mounted with 1.5 oz. of sealant, held the seal for 6-8 months, then got another 1.5 oz. of sealant. I had to pull the tire to replace a few spokes. The inside is so gummed up with dried Stans. I want to clean it up before remounting/sealing it. I'm not sweating the added weight. I'm thinking the tire's either not going to seal well or not seal at all because of how lumpy the bead is from the build up. I'm surprised Stans (someone) doesn't make a solvent for this. Should I worry about using general purpose solvents - muck off, gum out, etc.? I could see that turning into an unfortunate chemistry experiment rendering the new sealant less effective.

I'll admit, I'm weighing my time here - do I want to stand there picking at the bead for two hours or just throw away a good tire?




(damn, that's a huge pic. I still haven't figured out how to resize pics)

FBinNY 

You want to be cautious with solvents because what may dissolve the Stans may also attack the rubber coating of the tire itself. Consider using a wooden spoon (not your wife"s favorite sauce spoon) to scrape out the worst of the dried stuff, then call it a day.

Bill Kapaun

I've NEVER dealt with (or will) deal with sealants, but-
If you wear a leather glove, can you just squeeze the bead & rotate around the tire to "peel off" the sealant?

Barry2 

I use a stiff floor scrubbing brush.
Either outside with a bucket of water.
or
if “you know who” ain’t home, in the bath tub.

what the eye don’t see…….

Barry

soyabean

I would submerge the entire folded tire in a jar of yellow Goo Gone.

It shouldn't swell vulcanized rubber like tyres. Surely you can test that with a used discarded folded tyre, because we hoard a ton of those.

I rarely find a need to use it on bikes, but a godsend to remove old duct/sheathing tape from anything plastic.

tFUnK

Have you tried just reinflating as-is to see if it seats and holds? Might not cure the OCD in you but maybe worth a try to see if you can save some time and effort.

Andrew R Stewart 

Some sealants are dissolved by alcohol (I believe the latex based ones). At the shop we just peal/rub off what we can around the bear area. Andy

JohnDThompson 

Latex-based sealants can be dissolved with household ammonia solution; it will not affect butyl rubber tubes.

grumpus

I'd turn the tyre inside out, put it over a wheel to support it, and scrub it with a stiff brush and soapy water.

Camilo

I haven't done it yet, but just happened to do this search the other day. I make no claims to effectiveness of any of this, but it was where i was going to start:

remove dry sealant from bicycle tire - Search (bing.com)

dsaul

There is no need to remove all of the sealant from the bead. The new sealant will fill in any gaps. I've been using tubeless tires with sealant for years and have never had a problem with leaking around the bead because of sealant stuck on there. I've never been a fan of Stans. Orange Seal original(not the endurance version) is the best sealant that I've found.

cyccommute 

On what do you base your assertion that Goo Gone won’t swell rubber? A rubber chemical resistance chart say that rubber performs poorly when exposed to naphtha…which is largely what makes up Goo Gone. Not a good idea.

cyccommute 

Stan’s…which is latex based…uses propylene glycol. Most all of the ones I can find use propylene glycol. The latex isn’t “dissolved” in the propylene glycol but is suspended in it.

Propylene glycol is nonhazardous…we convert it to pyruvic acid if we drink it and we make pyruvic acid as part of the Kreb’s cycle during metabolization of sugars to energy…and doesn’t harm the rubber of tires.

I’m not convinced that it is a good substance to put in tires, however. A tire should be liquid proof so the question one should ask is how does the sealant “dry out”? Where does the liquid go? After observing a blistered tire…the tread was lifted at many points around the tire…and thinking about what happens to the liquid in the tire, I came to the conclusion that the glycol dissolves into the tire. It doesn’t travel through the tire like carbon dioxide can but stays there because propylene glycol have almost zero vapor pressure…it doesn’t evaporate.

icemilkcoffee 

Thats all good to know, but the question remains - how do you clean the dried up snot off the bead?

SoSmellyAir

I am also curious about this as I have just ordered a gravel bike, which comes with tubeless tires. The NIH says:

"It may exist in air in the vapor form, although propylene glycol must be heated or briskly shaken to produce a vapor."

Propylene Glycol | C3H8O2 - PubChem (nih.gov)

I imagine that the sealant sloshing around in the tire is akin to being "briskly shaken." So are you saying that propylene glycol does not evaporate within a small, enclosed environment like the interior of a mounted tubeless tire?

cyccommute 

Physically…in other words, you have to pull it off. There’s not much that is going to touch the rubber of the sealant after it has polymerized. It’s a bit analogous to paint. Once dried, it’s not going come off easily. Anything that can dissolve it…and I can’t think of anything that can…is going to dissolve the tire as well.

cyccommute 

“Briskly shaken” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. If you heat it, you can get some of it into a vapor form but just shaking it isn’t going to volatilize much of the material. And by “heating it”, they mean at or way above the boiling point of water. It really doesn’t evaporate well. In a closed system like a tire, it shouldn’t evaporate at all. A tire should act like the bottle it comes in. In other words, the liquid shouldn’t go anywhere and certainly shouldn’t evaporate. I’ve heard all kinds of explanations for were the liquid goes like “the tire burps” or “the glycol is lost through the valve stem”. Neither of those are good explanations that stand up to scrutiny. If the liquid is lost due to tire burps, why doesn’t the tire go flat all the time? If the glycol is lost through the valve stem, the lose of the liquid would be variable and easily fixed by not letting the liquid leak out.

The propylene glycol goes through the tire and, due to that, a fair amount of the liquid is trapped in the rubber matrix because it doesn’t evaporate easily. It washes off fairly easily but that does nothing for the liquid that is still trapped in the tire.

yannisg

Stan's is a great sealant, but has two disadvantages it corroded my DuraAce and Ultegra road rims, and the residue is very difficult to remove from the tire and rim.
I've tried various approaches, and the best was turning the tire inside out and scrubbing it with a hard plastic brush under hot water.
I never left my tires to accumulate so much residue before I cleaned them.
I've now switched to Effetto Maripose for the above 2 reasons

icemilkcoffee 

I see. The bad news is that the sealant sticks really well to the rubber. It takes a whole lot of rubbing to get it off the beads in tiny flecks.

SoSmellyAir

Heh heh, I hoard clincher tires but I have not bought one that comes in a bottle yet. But I have already ordered three tubeless tires as future replacements for the ones that will come with my gravel bike; maybe Excel will throw in a bottle too?

But seriously, does this phenomenon weaken the tire?

Koyote

Pull off any big chunks, remount, add a bit of fresh sealant, ride.

It’s really not any more complicated than that.

Camilo

Thanks for your very understandable technical stuff in this thread. I studied the Krebs Cycle at one point, but have no real understanding of it anymore.

This has been interesting, probably functionally not meaningful to most of us, but interesting nonetheless. I'm on my very first couple of sets of tubeless tires which I mounted mid summer last year. I was planning on just adding some sealant to all four tires because that seems to be a fairly common way to replenish it, at least for a season or two before thinking about cleaning it. I might dismount one set just to see what it looks like.

Here's my question though: Do you think that theoretically, or actually, the tire itself would increase in weight by a few grams? It would take a before and after weight of an unused (but mounted and sealed) tire to figure that out, but it would be interesting to hear what sort of volume/weight of liquid might be trapped in the rubber.

cyccommute 

Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! The tire should act like the bottle that the sealant came in.


Not so much anymore as they have changed rubber formulations and construction but it was a fairly common problem in the early days of DIY tubeless. The sealant would cause the tread to delaminate and form “bubbles” under the tread

cyccommute 

The thing to remember is that nothing ever just “goes away”. Substances can change form or react to form new compounds but nothing is lost. The founding principle of chemistry is the conservation of mass. Some substances will convert from liquid (or solid) into gas but the mass of the substance will always be the same. The volume changes but the mass doesn’t.

Sealant doesn’t simply “dry out”. It has to go somewhere and the mass of the sealant goes where ever the sealant goes to. Propylene glycol has a vapor pressure of 11 Pa (pascals) at 20°C (70°F or room temp). For comparison, water has a a vapor pressure at room temperature of about 3200 Pa. That may not mean much but water is about 290 times more likely to evaporate than propylene glycol is…and water isn’t all that easy to evaporate. Propylene glycol basically doesn’t evaporate. Once in the tire, it doesn’t really go anywhere. It doesn’t evaporate and about the only place it can be is in the tire. If you are adding 115 g (about the weight of 4 oz) of sealant to your tire and it is “going away”, most of that 115 g is going to be in the tire. If you add another 115g and it “goes away”, that 230 g or about 1/2 pound. And so on. Each time you are adding sealant and each time it “goes away”, the weight goes into the tire. There is likely a limit as to how much propylene glycol will dissolve into the rubber but I have no idea how much or even if there is a limit, for that matter.

I haven’t weighed tires because I don’t do tubeless. One of the reasons I don’t do tubeless is because of the above. Another has to do with the number of bikes I own and the frequency that I ride some of them. It’s not worth doing tubeless just to have the sealant dissolve into the tire as the bike sits unused. I have two bikes that I could probably justify going tubeless will but I just don’t find it something I want to deal with.

SoSmellyAir

Good to know; riding tubeless gravel and tire problem means quite a walk.

I understand that conservation of mass. This means that after two cycles of adding sealant the tire would have increased by the weight of a tube. That is quite a bit of mass to spin up.