Tofu Ball

TL;DR: Knowledge I distilled after I did a lot of research and practice to setup tubeless on my mountain bike.

A few years back, I setup tubeless tires for my then road bike. Initially it was a success. However, it ran into problems later on and I went back to tubes in the end.

Long after I left my previous bike, I got another bike. This time I bought a cross country mountain bike. It's been a surprise to me how much things have changed for a mountain bike since the last time I owned one 8 yrs ago. My new bike is a 1-by, which is standard for mountain bikes now. Mountain bikes also have dropper posts as a standard part too. I never seen one of these before. Dropper posts are so great for urban use, you can easily get on and off the bike between traffic while maintaining pedal efficiency. These should be a standard on level-up commuter bikes. A good pair of hydraulic brakes are also very cheap, and even 12/13 speed derailleurs can be had for a decent price.

However, since I'm an N=1 cyclist I probably don't need a bike that run 2.4 tires that released ages ago on 19mm rims for my daily commute. With the new trend of the hard-to-define gravel bike, I decided to change my tire to some low rolling resistance gravel tires. With all the knowledge about rolling resistance I learned on YouTube and the Internet, I realized I should do tubeless again. Even with more puncture resistant tires, tubeless still offers so much less rolling resistance. This time I need to do it right and not do it in a head aching way.

With all the tubeless installation knowledge flowing on the Internet, I want to recommend 4 videos to watch to acquire all the knowledge you could need. These are the best picks after I spend can't-count-how-many hours on researching this topic. Watches these BEFORE you buy anything for your setup!! – How to Setup Tubeless Tires by Park Tool – Tubeless Tire Troubleshooting by Park Tool – Answered: Your Top 5 Selected Tubeless Tire Fail Questions! by SILCA Velo – The SECRET TO INSTALLING TUBELESS WITH A FLOOR PUMP (no air compressor or charger) by Syd Fixes Bikes The 3rd video is especially important, because it talks about some very important knowledge that tutorials won't teach you.

This time I have access to an air compressor, but it didn't help much. In the end I used a booster floor pump with all the different tubeless success rate booster methods combined to finally get my tire seated and it already holds more than a few weeks.

To distill my experience in a hard-to-get-working tubeless setup, this is the list of things I did as success rate addons: – Add more sealant than the sealant bottle tells you to add if you have “Tubeless Ready” tire. The tire will want to drink a lot of sealant during the first week or so. – Ride every-single-day, even if only a few hundred meters, in your first week after you finished setup. Check pressure (pinch the tire by hand is good enough) and pump if needed before riding. – Use a modern sealant. They are simply formulated much better than older ones. – Shake you wheel after it's seated. It's not enough to ride or spin it, because that won't get your sealant to splash enough onto your rim tape to seal gaps in the tape. – If you don't have a wheel truing stand, put your bike upside down when you are installing the rim tape. As the 3rd video instructed, use TPP tape. However TPP tape is usually less sticky than PET tape, and you need to give it LOTS OF tension to have it stick well. So don't use your leg to hold the wheel while pulling the tape, use a stand or a upside-down bike. This way you can use one hand to pull the wheel as hard as you can and use the other hand to pull the tape as hard as you can to give it enough tension to stick well. – Use a tire lever to press down the rim tape firmly for the sides stick to rim under the hook where your hand or a towel can't reac – Use superglue to hold the last section of rim tape – Use a string to tightly wrap around the outer circumference of the tire before pumping – Use soapy water to further reduce the gap between tire and rim

Generally speaking, if you find it extremely hard to sit your tire onto the bead, get the tire to leak less air before considering pumping air into it faster. The speed of pumping is ultimately limited by your valve. Even if you removed your valve core to do the seating, the valve body is still a very tiny tube, and a gap between one section of your tire and the rim can easily be much larger than the area of the valve tube.

Happy cycling, and enjoy the mental preparedness to take on the tubeless setup challenge!

(If you decided to not go for tubeless after reading this, I recommend you to buy some TPU tubes from AliExpress 😊.)