Tubeless Tyres -"saying the same things about tubeless tyres over and over again" Hippy read the first f**king post

Some thoughts on my own tubeless adventure of recent (and not so recent) times.

I’ve had two sets if ENVE rims setup as tubeless for quite sometime now, one set on the (now gone) CAAD12 and one set on the Cross bike.

For the new Bike Of All Work I wanted to use the Cross bike wheels as they have centre lock hubs, which would give me a 140mm rotor with the Freeza disc at the rear.

The Cross bike tyres didn’t leak air, didn’t soften appreciably over night, had gone on with just a track pump - they’d been the perfect tubeless experience.

Therefore I was not expecting what happened next:

• The tyres were an epic, mind-blowing pain in the arse to get off, seriously considered cutting the fuckers off at numerous points in my battle with them. Key learning here was to apply pressure along as much of the tyre wall as possible - focussed pressure doesn’t work, pressure over a large area does. I’ve never fought a pair of tyres so hard as I had to fight these.
  
• I cleaned the rims, then mounted the new tyres
  
• Both valves now leaked like fuck. I had made zero changes to the valves. I’d not even taken the cores out. I have no idea why they changed from being perfectly airtight to anything but, however this was the reality
  
• I stripped the old (Gorilla) tape off both rims, cleaned the rim bed with Isopropyl, used the Tesa tape identified in this thread. I gave each rim two wraps - this, I think, is insufficient - I’d go with a minimum of three in future, maybe more.
  
• I clearly made the valve holes in the tape too large, I was making an “X” shaped incision with a pen knife, I finally had success using a hole punch to make a neat cut-out for the valve that was slightly smaller than the valve stem (I used additional sections of tape that I put over the valve hole area, rather than re-wrapping the rims again)
  
• The front tyre held 100 psi overnight, with three wraps of tape and sealant
  
• The rear softened overnight, this has two wraps of tape and sealant, I may strip the tyre off and give it a further wrap of tape
  
• I finally rode the bike into work today
  
  

So - redo from start rather than re-use old tape/valves, use more tape than you think you should, make your valve holes small.