Fixing Punctures / Puncture Repair / Exploding Tubes

The new A 23 is a tubeless ready rim and like pretty much all rims with a tubeless internal design, is a bit tight. You need a "compliant" tyre or a good set of thumbs/levers combined with a good technique.

Putting the summer tyres on was fine, they being much more compliant (still required a lever to get the last bit on). It was getting the marathons off that caused the main issue, it was ok to pop the bead off in one place, but then so tight as to make it very difficult to push the lever round to unseat the tyre/get a second lever in.

Reading up it seems the shallow profile means you are better off using thin rim tape rather than the Velox cloth stuff as the shallow profile of the inner bit of the rim, combined with thick(ish) cloth tape means you lose the channel in which you can normally 'drop' the bead into to give yourself some working room.

Some people recommend Kapton tape as being thin, good and in fact the same stuff resold in tubeless tape kits, so I might try that if/when the tyres next come off. Pleasingly (in hindsight having now found this out) I switched the Velox cloth tape on one of the rims, which had rolled away from some of the spoke holes, with a bike ribbon strip which I fortuitously had in my spares box.

Is talc'ing/similar the inner tubes worthwhile at all?

I think my wheels have the tubeless ready rim sidewinder if you want to give that a go

It seems they are, so I might give that a look when cyclocross season comes round, at the moment I am just looking forward to getting some road miles in and hearing the click of the Hope freewheel.