My bad for not paying attention about hookless, but when I bought my new bike late last year (Giant Propel) it came with hookless wheels. I thought “cool”. Now I’m trying to not react to the general FUD.
But frankly, the industry is really not helping the issue. The Propel came with Giant SLR 1 wheels, with 22.5mm inner width. It also came with Cadex Race 25mm tires, with a minimum tire pressure of 70PSI!
crazy sauce!
Silca gives me very same tire pressure recommendations for my setup. I didn’t play the odds with them, but with the Sram.
Silca doesn’t require inner rim width nor type of rim (hooked os hookless), so I assume Sram would be better.
There’s no way I would go back to riding the pressures Silca recommends for me. The ride quality suffers too much. I find Zipp pressures much more to my liking.
I’ve been using hookless 23 IW with 30mm tires or wider, I wasn’t concerned initially. However, the recent incidents and the response from manufacturers leave a lot to be desired.
Low tire pressure shouldn’t be an issue. As mentioned above, for most people 73 PSI is above the recommendation for optimizing performance and you can go way lower if you want more comfort. Hookless are clearly not for those to run higher than that, for whatever reason.
The issue is the safety margins. Precision, tolerances and quality control are not the best in the cycling industry. I don’t trust their standards when catastrophic failure is just millimeters away.
The problem also compounds when safety depends on tire and wheel manufacturers working independently.
Do they test for heat, deformation under load, impacts, speeds, etc? I know they do tests and they don’t want their products failing. However, so many things can go wrong with hookless that I wonder if their tests are outdated.
Hookless have been around for a few years now. The current lineup of Zipp wheels are from 2020 or 2021? Have there been many blowouts before? I know this is hard to document. I’ve seen a few here and there but it seems it’s getting more attention now.
Whether De Gendt hit a rock or not is secondary. Tires shouldn’t come of so easily.
That said, it could also happen with hooked wheels but it’s much harder.
From the top of my head a lot of the tire blowouts (hooked or hookless) are on Vittoria tires. Is that correct?
Giant does a lot of testing, just make sure you use tires on there approved list
You should be fine. The high profile incident are using wider rims (25mm IW) AND narrower tires (28mm), a combination that is outside of current ERTO and ISO recommendations.
I’m not sure this is true at smaller tire widths. The Silca calculator, which is in theory performance optimized, will regularly suggest pressures above 73psi for 28mm tires.
It’s not many. It’s small percentages but too high of a percentage when a blowoff while riding might mean crash and/or injury.
Plus we’ve yet to see any tangible benefits to the consumer. They claim cheaper but if it’s $20 per rim, the savings isn’t much nor worth it, IMO, on a $1000-3000 wheelset.
From that link above:
“While I know that hookless really is generally robust in the larger tire sizes as your experience has shown, I will say that in the 100+ tires we’ve tested over the last few years on 40+ wheels, we’ve had 6 blowoffs in tire seating, 3 blowoffs below the 110% ISO test, and 1 blowoff of a wheel just leaning against a wall. Every single one of them was on a hookless rim and following ETRTO guidelines. Or stated from the other side, we’ve never had a hooked tubeless blow off, and that’s from a larger sample size and includes combinations that violate ETRTO in the pursuit of performance gains.”
Yes it has happened to me (except my case is too much PSI in a gravel configuration, same concept different situation).
Fair, and I will definitely follow their approved list. Their support page also includes a helpful “Tires I should not use” list (Giant Hookless Technology | Giant Bicycles US).
What is NOT helpful is their tire pressure calculator.
As a 78Kg rider, it tells me to use 79PSI (above the UCI 73PSI guideline).
It also tells me that “for all Giant tires this minimum (MIN) pressure can now be defined as 70 psi (4.8 bar) for 23C & 25C tires, 50 psi (3.4 bar) for 28C tires and 45 psi (3.1 bar) for 32C tires . Never inflate to less than the MIN pressure.”
So, my bike came stock with a tire / wheel combo owned and manufactured by Giant and I have a 3PSI window between the minimum and maximum pressure.
Interesting fair enough. I guess the next obvious question…is the blowoff rate significantly worse than with hooks, or even with tubes on standard rims? I don’t know the answers…I wouldnt even speculate. Just saying that nothing is ever perfect…
I am not saying it isnt possible, but I have not had a tire blow off a hooked rim.
I run my current tubless road tires that are hooked with a 21mm ID and 25mm continental tires at 85psi R and 83psi F respectively and do not have issues with them.
I’ve been riding road bikes for 40+ years and have never blown a tire off of a hooked rim using normal pressures -even 120psi because we used to think that was fast back in the day.
I am in agreeance here also - I think even in 2018 i was still doing 105/110 on my TT bike.
I’ve blown multiple tubed tires off rims
Thanks, and again, the moral of the story is don’t buy hookless for road.
Yes, that’s a shortcoming of hookless but it’s something still within your control. Not ideal but it’s something you can deal with.
The main problem, in my opinion, is if:
You do everything right but there’s still a chance of failure.
The tolerances and QC in the cycling industry are not good enough to have such a small margin of error.
Manufacturers not taking the steps to prevent consumers from making potentially catastrophic mistakes. Like the example above where the stock components only left 3 psi of margin while most pressure gauges will have higher margins of error.
I am not actually convinced they are slower. This is quite difficult to determine conclusively. But, I will say that my power data does not reflect any major loss in performance with the tires I run by having them inflated to favor comfort a bit. I am not sure why Silca is actually an authority on this anyway. They are a small company with limited resources, so how much testing could they have done to come up with this data?
Well, the simple answer is that the built in gauges in pumps are almost never accurate.
My standalone gauges agree to within 3 psi. I have 4 of them.
Exactly. I can live with not being able to run optimal pressures but I might not live if a blows out.