I have a second hand TT bike with Zipp 808’s. It’s got the disc wheel on the rear and recently the pressure would leek out after about 45 mins of use. I cannot be botherd with Tubeless. It’s just not for me.
I’ve decided to revert the wheel set up and go back to tubular. I understand how these work and I’m old school.
Please excuse the silly question, however do I need to remove all the glue completely with relevent solvent before looking to put an inner tube back on? Also should I be looking to insert rim tape on the wheel also?
The bad news is, there is no easy solution. Muc-off makes a glue and sealant remover, but it seems to be more geared to cleaning off the residue of sealant, not dissolving large dried up boogers of sealant. The best I’ve managed is picking at the globs by hand which can be a painstaking process. Then the Muc-off may work well at that point.
The glue kind of came off easily enough. It’s just now really sticky around the rim. There isn’t really any tubeless tape on the rim at all, hence why I thought about adding some.
My plan is to get some latex tubes in there and some new tires. Hope it all works out.
Not sure you used ‘tubular’ correctly. But you are unable to use a tubeless wheel as a tubular one.
But to go to a tubed tire you would just have to clean out most of the sealant. Probably like 90% is good enough. I’ve never tried to clean it with a solvent since I’m not sure how it’d affect the tire rubber or the carbon and clear coats. I’ve always gotten as much off as I could by hand, then doing the rest very carefully with a razor blade.
The wheel would have to already have rim tape from being tubeless but if you want a clean start then you’ll have to add back some tape to prevent the tube from going into the spoke holes in the rim bed.
Sorry if I used the terminology incorrectly. However are you saying, I can’t use a wheel, that was previously set up with a tubeless tire, as a wheel with an inner tube and new tire?
No worries, I wanted to make sure we were talking about the same thing. A tubular is a special kind of tire that has the tube sewn into it and is then glued onto the rim. It’s an older style that is not only really used in super high pressure track tires or super low pressure cyclocross racing. So you can’t use a tubed or tubeless wheel with tubular.
But you can use most tubeless wheels with a regular tire and inner tube set-up.
Clincher = Tire + tube
Tubeless = Tire + sealant
Tubular = Special tires… I don’t this this is what you meant in the OP
If you are going from tubeless to clincher (tire + tube) and using new tires as you stated, just remove the old tires, clean up the old sealant (it comes of wheels pretty easily, tires not so much), and install tube and tire. You can use the rim tape from tubeless assuming it is in good shape.
I semi gave up on tubeless until I realised it was the sealant that was useless. I put a tube in at the roadside and it was still in the bike for months. I think longer term I would have fully cleaned the sealant out but what was left of it and not left on the side of the road en route to John O Groats didn’t do any harm.
I recently did the same thing. I cannot handle dealing with sealant all over my hands and kit on the side of the road when tubeless has catastrophically failed me (3 times in 12 months). To clean up the sealant off the rims I got off as much as I could with water then used isopropyl alcohol for the remainder. I left the tape in place. Now using GP5000 + TPU inner tubes at about tubeless pressures.
One thing to keep in mind is that if you have a hookless (tubeless straight side) rim you will need to use a tubeless specific tire. The beads of “regular” clincher tires are potentially too stretchy and may come off of a hookless rim when pressurized.
