I'm not the ultimate expert, but I have used sealant extensively in tubes and in tubeless tires. My own conclusions are based largely on Orange Seal in its regular/original and "Endurance" formulae and Stan's of 5-6 years ago. My experience:
1. Good modern sealants do allow you to use very nice, light, supple tires in goathead infested areas where, without sealants, such tires mean a thorn flat every ~10 miles or more frequently. 2. Orange Seal works better than Stan's in tubes and tubeless, at least the Stan's available in 2014. That is to say, both in tubes and tubeless as described below, OS seals faster, and more often without the "pump and spin" intervention -- IOW, with OS you notice fewer flats. 3. OS works very well in tubeless tires at low pressures. For me, "low pressures" are sub 30 psi, regularly 18-to-21 psi, and generally above 16 psi. I have not used it tubeless over about 35 psi. 4. OS Endurance works as well as OS Regular in low pressure -- as above -- tubeless tires, and has the advantage of lasting longer: I seem to get 4 to 6 months instead of ~3-4 months between fillings; the sign of the need for replenishment is more punctures that don't seal "automatically" and that you therefore notice. (Note that replenishment generally speaking seems to be required less often in colder, more humid conditions than in our summer conditions of mid-90s*F/ sub 10% humidity.) 5. OS works very well in tubes at higher pressures, say over 40 or 45 psi; at 50 to 60 psi it works about 95% (the number is a metaphor, not a statistic) as well as in tubeless tires at the low pressures mentioned, where it works very well indeed;. 6. OS Does not work well in tubes at very low pressures: say, 20 psi. Discovering this made me switch to tubeless for off road riding. 7. OS **Endurance** does not work well in tubes even at higher pressures --at the 50 to 60 psi at which I keep my 28 mm Elk Passes. I had almost as frequent goathead flats with OS E as without any sealant -- over a month or so, every ~ 10 miles with 178 gram 559 X 28 Elk Passes -- as with similar tires sans sealant -- 700C X 29 mm Parigi Roubaix -- which flatted every ~5 miles or so. When I switched back to OS R for these road tubes, the flat experience reverted to "normal" as above. 8. Very important: Sealant is not a magic cure-all; it can be a f*****g pain in the arse, though a minor pain when used where it works best. If you don't have goatheads, I'd think very hard about using it at all. OTOH, it lets you use truly superlative tires in environments where, tubeless or tubes, they'd otherwise not be possible at all. My own threshold for fixing flats is pretty high: if I could get by with no more than 2 flats per 100 miles, I'd choose tubes and no sealant for road tires. More than this -- I rode for years here in goathead land using over 150 Remas per year -- I choose sealant in tubes. As for sealant in tubeless tires at road pressures, I don't have experience with these, but stories like that referenced make me hesitate. On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 4:27 PM Brady Smith <bradysmit...@gmail.com> wrote: > > A few months ago I was behind a guy on a brevet who was riding a brand new > Giant road bike--Di2, road tubeless, the works. He hit a staple and I got a > rather large spray of sealant in the face. He also spent the next 45 minutes > trying and failing to seal the hole, then getting a tube in, then having the > tube fail because of debris in the tire, etc. I'd been tubeless-curious up > until that point, but I decided thereafter that my tubed Paselas work just > fine. > > On Saturday, ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Patrick Moore Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/CALuTfguk4%3DjLu0tLaiUJ8R4DkrokX2WksZCwUCN-QVr-hGxjFw%40mail.gmail.com.
