oldbobcat

A rider who can't be bothered to check their tire pressure once or twice a week won't want to bother with tubeless. And tubeless tires lose air, too.

Iride01 

You say your tire was inflated to 50 psi, which I'd think adequate for a 2.0 inch tire. However if you didn't check your tire pressure before your ride, then it may have been much lower.

The thin rubber tubes we use whether latex or butyl will loose air over time. Though with lower PSI and higher volume tires as yours are they do seem to go further between top offs than my 25mm wide tires which I top off at least every third day of consecutive days of riding..

One of the big tell tail signs of something being wrong is if your valve stems are not perpendicular to the rim. If they are leaning, then that is future problems and you need to find out why. Usually for me that had been underinflation.

Sorcerer

Hi George,

You mentioned that the valve stem holes in the rims are kind of rough. For that it is possible to take a small file and deburr them. That's not an unreasonable thing to try and small files are available at hardware stores and come in handy for many things.

As for the rim strip, I doubt that is part of the problem, but I dislike the butyl rubber type because they are heavy, they break down over time, and lose their elasticity and eventually (could take years) creep and expose the spoke holes and result in a flat.

I've been mountain biking for a long time and tires slipping around a rim has long been an occasional problem.

One of the leading causes in my experience has been with rims that for some reason are apparently the tiniest amount smaller and do not hold the tire/tube/rim together as tightly as they should.

We would always keep an eye on the stem when we checked our pressures before riding and deflate and readjust the stem to perpendicular if needed.

But there were tire/rim combinations that the tire slid too much on. Not wanting to waste perfectly good tread we developed a solution.

It's not pretty.

Take an old inner tube and cut it into sections of 5" or so. These pieces are installed under the innertube with the ends sticking out of the rim between the tire bead and the rim. This effectively shims the tire bead, making it tighter. It may also be that the rubber sort of grips the bead, but I think the shim effect is what makes this work. We would usually use 2-4 shims. There is a weight penalty and there is a potential unbalanced penalty as well. However in practice, we never really noticed. We would cut the shims down with sharp scissors as close to the rim as is practical.

I write in the past tense because almost of our bikes are tubeless now. However I still have a wheel in the garage that has these shims in it.

Also perhaps surprisingly, no one notices the hack unless they are fellow bike geeks.

BTW George, you did mention about trying to make the set-up tubeless. Well it's possible, but it might not be worth the hassle and expense from the sounds of it. It doesn't sound like you are mountain biking.

In your part of Colorado there are terrible goat heads that give out multiple punctures. I would recommend using regular tubes and squirting Slime into the innertube through the Schrader valve with the core removed. But I don't have much experience with that technique. I've done it, but not in Goat-head country. I'm not sure how effective Slime is against them. It's worth a try maybe.

George Mann

Well, I decided that I am going to give up on this bike and buy an Ebike (and convert it to tubeless) do to no longer being healthy enough to ride a regular one.

Thanks for all your help.

Andrew R Stewart 

Tubeless and E assist? Out of the frying pan and into the fire when a problem develops... Increasing complexity when not handling the base level already wouldn't be my choice. Andy

Sorcerer

BF strikes again.

Double down George and put some Cush Core inserts into that eBike's rims while you're at it. That fix it.

trucklet

Yup get the Cush Cores and be done with it, especially if you end up with something internally geared.

Inusuit

I think I can solve all my mechanicals by buying a new bike.

Symox

These have been my favorite rim strips. Never had an issue with them. They stay put and aren't abrasive.