Monday 25 July 2011

The Scientific Method

The demise of the front rim on my new mountain bike provides an opportunity to start with a clean slate on tubeless setup techniques. The motivation is two-fold: first, to experience the relatively maintenance and trouble free world of a properly set up tubeless wheelset, and second to develop as foolproof a protocol as I can for setting up our cross wheels tubeless. There are lots of advantages to this.

So first step was to do a shitload of reading and YouTube video watching and such. Then decide what materials to use. Then build/install said materials. Then ride and test. At then end of it all I should be a lot smarter about a bunch of the equipment involved in the whole shebang.

First, the gear:
Front Rim - Stan's NoTubes ZTR Arch 29er
Front Spokes - Sapim Race, 2.0-1.8 DB
Front Nipples - Sapim Alloy
Front Hub - Specialized Hi/Lo (stock from Stumpjumper)
Front Spoke Tension - 85kgf rotor side
Front Rimstrip - Stan's NoTubes Plus Four
Front Tire - Geax Saguaro 2.2 regular folding
Front Valve - Stan's NoTubes MTB valve
Front Tape - 21mm Yellow Tape, with substrate layer(s) of Velox as needed
Rear Wheel - DT Swiss X450 (stock from Stumpjumper)
Rear Rimstrip - Stan's NoTubes Plus Four
Rear Tire - Maxxis CrossMark 2.0 regular folding
Rear Valve - Stan's NoTubes MTB valve
Rear Tape - 21mm Yellow Tape, with substrate layer(s) of Velox as needed
Rear Spoke Tension - 85kgf drive side

All of the Stan's stuff will be coming in a bit, and it's going to take me a bit to get the wheel built. Meantime I'm scraping and scrounging and using tubes and whatever else.

My main priority is to burp-proof the tires, and get them rolling reliably down to whatever pressure seems beneficial.

Stay tuned.

3 comments:

Jim said...

>>>The motivation is two-fold: first, to experience the relatively maintenance and trouble free world of a properly set up tubeless wheelset, and second to develop as foolproof a protocol as I can for setting up our cross wheels tubeless

Totally different missions brother. It's like comparing the moon mission, with ICBMs. Other than the fact both vehicles shoot flames out their ass and move upward with a payload, they couldn't be more different. I know some folks who have had luck w/t tubeless CX but the selection of tires is pretty dismal. Tubular is still die weg zu aufgehen.

Dave K said...

Well, you're partly right, but the premise of Stan's and tubeless in general is that as long as that sidewalls aren't absolute window screens in their porosity (as some definitely are), you can run what tires you choose. People are going to want to use our wheels tubeless, I already know that, so I may as well play guinea pig in as orderly a manner as I can, right? I mean call up Specialized and ask them for the wheelbuilding specs on a set of hubs that THEY supply and that have THEIR logo on them, and three days later you might get totally irrelevant spoke lengths for a set of wheels that isn't even the wheelset that failed on you. That's typical customer service experience A. I'd like to be able to offer a bit more relevant expertise to our customers.

But wait till you see the great xc (not cx) tubular experiment. Yup.

Jim said...

Dave, I don't know whether you're a genius, or one of those people who falls into the category of, "Yep. He asked a lot of questions that nobody was asking. For good reason."

And if this involves making your CX wheelset into an XC wheelset...