boozergut

Hello:


I repaired a front tire flat this weekend from a goat head that went through the center of my 700C tire and through the Mr. Tuffy Tire Liner. I only pull off the MUP to take breaks at a picnic table etc. so this was a bit of bad luck.


What is the latest tire and or liner technology for this issue?


Thanks in Advance!


Boozer.....

cyccommute 

You're looking at it. Many tires come with the liner integrated into the tire now but they really are just a fancier version of the Tuffy liner.

You could try sealants. They tend to be messier and cause valve sticking issues. Most everyone that I work with at my local co-op hates them with a passion because we have all been "slimed". I've tired sealants and not found them to be that effective. That may be how I was using it, however. I was told by a Slime sommelier that you should pull out the goat head and allow some air to push the Slime into the hole so that it seals. If the spine in still in the tube, it just reopens the hole all the time and never seals properly. I haven't tried it yet.

Someone will eventually come along touting the wonders of tubeless but that just the same thing as "Slime" and no necessarily fool proof. I've been on rides where the tubeless guys got flats due to goat heads and I didn't with Tuffy liners. I made the mistake of angering the Evil Goathead by boasting about it and ended up with 63 punctures the next year I did the same ride.

Don't anger the Evil Goathead

Inpd

Heavier tires with built in flat protection are good at stopping goat head thorns in the very center part of the tire thread. Anywhere off to the side, good luck.

DrIsotope

After a bout of front-tire flats on the wife's bike, including 2 on one ride, I went looking for Mr. Tuffy, but the local store only had something called Rhinodillos and it turns out that was a good thing. Currently passing 5,000 miles without a puncture, spread over two sets of tires. And her Clement Stradas were debris magnets.

User error, 100%. If properly mounted and maintained, it is virtually impossible to get a non-sealing puncture from a goathead (still weird for me to type, we've always called them bullthorns.) I have in excess of 10,000 miles on road tubeless, and have experienced zero punctures. I did once have a Schwalbe One keep going flat from an abrasion on the sidewall... because I forgot to check the sealant in the tire and it was bone-dry. So... user error.

cyccommute 

A goat head puncture has nothing to do with how the tire is mounted. It might has something to do with the way that the tire was maintained but that's a different issue. Personally, I can't see why a sealant inside a tire should need to be "maintained" at all. It's a sealed, air tight system. Slime tubes don't need to be "maintained" nor "refreshed" from time to time.

Chemically, I can see why the sealant for tubeless has to be "maintained" because they use the wrong solvent on it. If they used a different material that didn't dissolve into the tire, the sealant would never dry out.

Finally there is a difference between road and mountain bike flat frequency due to goat heads (we used to call them tackburrs). I can go for thousands of miles without a flat on road bikes even in goat head infested Colorado because I don't take the bike off roads. Even if I have to roll the bike off a road to fix something, I usually carry it to avoid goat heads because they tend to grow along the sides of roads here.

With a mountain bike, you just can't avoid them. But Tuffys work as well as sealants in my experience for off-road application.

DrIsotope

If the tire isn't properly mounted, it's going to leakdown. As it leaks down, it takes a little bit of the sealant with it, because the sealant is constantly trying to seal the leak. Sealant has to be maintained because we don't ride our bicycles in the vacuum of space-- a tire is most certainly not an air-tight system. If it were, we could fill a tire once and then never need to bother with it again. I mean, it would be great if that weren't the case, wouldn't it? Balloons would be infinite. Let's call a typical tubeless tire "deflation resistant."

Slime tubes absolutely need to be refreshed. The stuff does dry out after awhile, you know. Same with latex. It's a liquid, inside a tire, to help with puncture resistance. It's not magic juice. Air gets out of a tire and sealant dries out because a tire is only making it's best effort at being sealed. Pressure moves from high to low, always, and so long as we all put more than 14.7psi in a tire, that air is going to find a way out.

dagray

I live in goat head central and use Maxxis Padrone tubeless in 700x25. Yes I get goat head punctures, yes the sealant fills them.

Jarrett2

Anyone have a picture of a goathead?

(I'm already regretting this...)

bwilli88 

Jarrett2

Dang those look scary. Both of them

cyccommute 

So are you saying that every tubeless tire is mounted improperly? Tubeless tire sealant has to be replaced in all tubeless tires about every 6 months. That's a whole lot of leakage.

And, yes, air diffuses out of tubes and tires. There's a reasonable explanation for why that happens. But water and liquids don't...or shouldn't. You could fill a tube with water and come back years later and not see any appreciable loss of the water. You could fill a tube partly with air and partly with water and the water is still going to be there years later. Water doesn't diffuse out of the tube or tire because of it's surface tension.

The problem with the sealant currently used in tires is that the solvent used dissolves in the tire. That's where the sealant goes after only a short time...I consider 6 months to be a short time when it comes to liquids escaping from rubber containers. The other problem with the sealant is that the glycol they use doesn't evaporate since glycols don't have a very high vapor pressure. The solvent is actually just dissolving into the rubber. At some point, you would expect that the rubber would become saturated with the solvent and you would have to stop adding more but I have no idea how much glycol can dissolve in the rubber. It seems like a lot considering that a 600g tire can suck up 56g (2 oz) of low volatility solvent in short order.

I've observed this in tires that used to "blister" with tubeless tire conversions. I don't see blistering much anymore but the mechanism for the glycol to leave the tire is still the same one since the sealant has to be refreshed frequently.

Something else to consider on the weight wienie side, the glycol has a low volatility so the 2 oz of sealant goes into the tire and stays there. The next two ounces goes into the tire and stays there. And the next. And the next. Some gets ablated off but probably not a significant amount. The tire weight is increasing with each application of sealant by 56g. That could quickly become a significant weight gain on a part of the bike where gaining weight has more of an impact than anywhere else.

Slime doesn't dry out in my experience nor have I ever heard of someone needing to "refresh" it. I've been Slimed by plenty of old Slime tubes at my local co-op. We've had lots of old bikes with plenty of Slime left over even after the air has gone out of the tires.

And, again, gases and liquids operate under very different mechanisms when in a pressurized tire. Yes, gases diffuses out quickly and even at different rates. Carbon dioxide diffuses rapidly because it dissolves in the rubber like the glycol in tubeless sealants. Nitrogen takes longer. Oxygen in kind of in the middle. But liquids don't usually diffuse out of rubber containers.

Finally, the only reason that tubeless is slightly puncture resistant is for the same reason that Slime is slightly puncture resistant. It's the sealant. Without that sealant, tubeless isn't any more puncture resistant than a normal tire. Personally, I find the whole complicated procedure of mounting the tires and the need for constant maintenance to not be worth the marginal puncture resistance. I have some experience with mounting the tires at my local co-op. It took 2 hours and 4 people to get the old tire off and the new tire on and sealed.

I'll pass.

cyccommute 

Assuming the DFW in your sig line is Dallas/Ft. Worth, I'm amazed that you've never seen them. I'm sure that you can get all you like just a bit to the north (Oklahoma City) and northeast (Amarillo) of you. Right now is prime goat head harvest season.

DrIsotope

That's the beauty of it. You are absolutely entitled to be wrong... which you are. I mean, I recognize that the apocalyptic amount of flats/punctures you've gotten is some sort of point of personal pride, but I'll stick to 10,000+ miles without a puncture. I don't need anything to mount my Maxxis tubeless other than a couple of minutes and my thumbs. If your experience with tubeless is limited to mounting a few tires at the local co-op, maybe you should stick to things you actually know about?

PhotoJoe 

What was this thread about again?

LGHT

I ride with puncture resistant tubes and don't worry about tires, flats, goats, lion's, tigers. Some say it adds resistance, but I'm not racing and will never really be that fast so it's not a huge issue for me. However flats are and have been a constant problem so I choose to avoid them altogether with these heavy duty tubes. I have yet to get a flat in over 2 years now and I never even bother packing spare tubes, c02, etc etc...

boozergut

Your pic is that of a sandbur which is a little les deadly than a goat head.

Milton Keynes

Sand burs bring back bad childhood memories of walking around barefoot and then getting one stuck in the bottom of my foot. We had one electric pole on the corner which had sand burs growing next to the base. We quickly learned to avoid that area if barefoot, since it seemed like the burs liked to find their way away from the pole.

cyccommute 

I fail to see the "beauty" of a 2 hour process that takes 8 man hours to achieve. A large part of the time was just figuring out how to get the bead out of the rim. It had a round bead on the tire that snapped into a round channel in the rim which made removal extremely difficult. Installation wasn't any easier and it was very messy. Even the paid mechanics at my local co-op dread tubeless installations given the mess and frustrating installation procedure.

As an aside, the rim that took so much time and man hours was brought in with another bike that used narrower road tires which had burped off the rim because they were trying to run them at 30 psi. They were easier to put back on the rim but nearly impossible to inflate because the tire had too large a gap. It was even messier than the other job because we had sealant leaking out all over the place.

As I pointed out, I can go just about as many road miles as you can with regular tubes and either liners or tires with integral liners. If I wanted to carry around the weight of sealant, I could install Slime and get just as good a result with less mess and fuss.

Ah, the subtle ol' "Don't pay any attention to this guy because he knows nothing" ad hominem. Classy.

My experience with tubeless is limited to mounting a few tires at my local co-op because I don't see the need for tubeless when I have other strategies that work just as well. Tubeless is a rather expensive proposition to just "try" on a whim. I have no problem adopting new technologies if they make my life easier but tubeless is just not one of those technologies. I don't have problems with pinch flats because I ride my tires with proper pressure to avoid them. I don't like extra weight and mess of sealant whether it's Slime or tubeless sealant nor do I relish the idea of tearing apart a difficult to install tire every 6 months just to replace something that shouldn't need replacing.

cyccommute 

Actually a lot less deadly to tires but not to bare feet or fingers. Damn those things hurt and the spines are smaller.

DrIsotope

If it took the group of you 8 man hours to unmount a tire, I understand why you all work for free.

Further evidence you don't know what you're talking about. Slime ≠ Latex sealant. And dear lord, heaven forbid you burden yourself by carrying a 2oz bottle of latex with you. I'm sure you cancel that weight out with spare tubes, CO2, levers, etc, etc., and I'm sure that stuff totally weighs less (not that makes any difference whatsoever.) Oh, and around 6,000 miles on road tubeless this year for me. Zero punctures.

You have never ridden on tubeless tires, yet you talk them down at every opportunity. You and your buddies had a hard time mounting them one time, "they must suck." If anyone wants to get into the business of logical fallacy, go grab a mirror, guy. You're dismissing them as an option out of hand, with no practical experience. So yes, absolutely, with regard to the matter in question, your opinion is less valid than my empirical evidence.

Replace sealant every 6 months? I genuinely wouldn't know. I've yet to have a tire last past 3 months. If I was putting on 60 miles a week like many of the BF elite, I might have a different view. But I ride quite a bit, and tubeless has positives that far, far outweigh the negatives.

Homebrew01

MOD NOTE: Everyone, Please stay on topic, and not make it personal. Thanks

Jack Kessler

Not to be narcissistic, but I do not care about flat problems in New England, Florida, or the DFW area. I intend to do the GDMBR, the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, this summer. What can those of you who have done the GDMBR recommend about flat hazards there? Someone has already mentioned Colorado being the goathead capital of universe. But Colorado is vast and most of the bikes in it are around Denver and Boulder. What tires should I consider for the GDMBR? I expect 29ers between 2" and 2.5".

Altair 4

In 11 years of riding, I've had two flats, both on rear tires, so they were messier changes (after the second one, I put a pair of vinyl painting gloves in my saddle bag). I bought Mr. Tuffy liners and that seems to have helped. It's been years since I had a flat ('Course, I've just doomed myself).

giffenf

I went looking for Mr Tuffys but only found Rhinodillos, so I put them inside the Gatorskins on my commuter bike. Only one flat so far and that was because a seam on the rim side of the tube gave out. My commute goes through East and Central L.A., which has pavement so bad I call it the Cobblestones Stage of my ride. I got some more Rhinodillos and some Michelin Protek Max tubes for my MTB and haven’t had a flat since. When I wear out the rims on my commuter bike, maybe I’ll buy a tubeless wheelset, but I suspect I will retire by then and not need to commute anymore. And when I upgrade to a better MTB, I’ll go tubeless there, too. My new road bike is ready for tubeless, but came with tubes. I’ll wait until I wear out the tires before upgrading that one. No flats yet on it, either, but it’s only been 2 months.

canopus 

Please start a new post as you have pulled up a 5 year old thread to start a new conversation...