tudorowen1

Has anyone had experience of fitting a Tannus tyre on the rear wheel of a Brompton ?

cplager

I've put them on 20" (406) wheels. It was hard but it was doable.

(for what it's worth, I found the rolling resistance to be too high and went back to regular tires.)

tudorowen1

Thanks for your reply..

Fentuz

Yes, that's was I heard, difficult to fit, high rolling resistance, hard like a 80psi tyre...

And, the inserts are the same. I could not fit the insert and tyre on the rim... no way I could have fitted a slim inner tube.

2_i 

So what about the brakes? Brompton lacks brake cable releases, so to take a tire off you have the choice of either unscrewing the bolt that secures the cable or deflating the tire. Getting the cable back to the optimal tension is a major pain, but with Tannus you are not going to have a choice, just counting on the fewer instances when you need to take the wheel off. However, with tires equipped with a puncture resistant layer, you hardly ever get the punctures.

tudorowen1

With a Tannus tyre you have a tyre that never punctures so the problem does not arise..apart from when the trye wears out..

tds101 

These tires are said to slide easily on wet surfaces. I had considered them, but realized there's too many negatives with them.

Winfried

Don't you have Shimano inline quick release brake cable adjusters on your Brompton for precisely that reason? Or did I read that elsewhere?

Another solution is leaving the tire on, and simply fixing the flat, Dutch-style.

2_i 

Indeed I used to have them for that specific reason. However, in the long run they turned out to too much trouble and I took them off. Specifically, they did not release a lot of cable, 4mm if I remember correctly. With this much release, you either had to struggle a lot to get the tire through or still release some pressure. The releases tended to open spontaneously that you only found out when you pressed the brake and there was none. Finally, they were very heavy.

As to the Dutch style, I tend to avoid it. I anticipate all aspects of the job to be better, at least on the average, when taking the tire fully off. Yes, taking the rear off in Brompton is cumbersome, but i have done it so many times, that I could do it largely automatically when half asleep. Connecting back to the original topic, the puncture cases were relatively few there. The last two might have been changing sprockets and straightening the rear rack after the bike got brutalized in air travel.

Winfried

Using Marathon Plus tires, the few "punctures" I had were actually old patches that were no longer airproof → Get good quality patches.

cplager

FWIW, I didn't find this to be a huge problem. And they weren't even that uncomfortable.

But they were so *#$# slow I couldn't take it and took them off.

CrimsonEclipse

Schwalbe is working on a airless tire.
Apparently it's available in the EU but not the USA so far.

No additional information available.

(it's schwalbe so it's probably going to be a better produce