I don’t know if any of you have had to suffer through mounting an intractable tire on your bicycle wheel. I wrote about one person’s experience here. Well, here’s another one on thewashingmachine.post blog: “Suffice it to say, after two and a quarter hours of tyre wrestling, i still had a six centimetre section of tyre that point blank refused all persuasions to seat itself on the rim. despite possessing a Koolstop tyre jack, designed to ease the fitment process, i made no headway whatsoever, and gave up in order to make my tea.“
Pray that this never happens to you. In the writer’s case he was trying to mount a Challenge Chicane clincher tire, a tire intended for cyclocross. As you may know, cyclocross tire pressures are very low compared to road riding hovering in the mid-20s to even just below 20 psi. Those pressures are low enough that unless the tire is secured firmly to the rim, you could roll a tire enough sideways to burp the air in the case of tubeless or even roll the tire off in the case of an inadequately glued tubular. It goes without saying that you could roll a clincher tire off as well if you flatted your tire. The manufacturer is probably cognizant of these possibilities and has made its tires as tight as possible while still adhering to ETRTO guidelines. Furthermore in a cyclocross race you’re not going to be concerned about demounting or mounting your tires–you’re running to the pit to get your other bike.
Nonetheless the majority of these tires are not going to be used in race situations but in real life. Which is to say you are going to be replacing your own tires and probably while out riding when you flat. You’d better hope you’re using sealant rather than an inner tube and that your sealant works to plug up whatever puncture you incur.
I have a Koolstop tire jack and I’ve had to use it. But I have yet to encounter a tire that didn’t yield to its leverage. So the writer’s tire must have been incredibly tight, tighter than anything I’ve seen. If this had happened to me, I would have returned the tire and switched to another brand. But the writer loves those Challenge Chicane tires and so he persevered. (He did manage to get it on but by a completely different method you can read about in his post.)
All those caveats aside, one has to wonder what the Bike Industrial Complex is thinking. How are ordinary cyclists supposed to deal with ridiculously tight tires that one cannot repair while on the road and only can be remediated by using specialized tools in a workshop?
The other side of the equation is demounting a tight tire and I have encountered that experience as well. Roger has a gravel e-bike with reasonable Schwalbe tires. I have fixed flats for him twice and both times I was not able to get the tire bead out of the tire bead well either with my bare hands or with regular tire tools. (Note that a Koolstop tire jack is for mounting tires, not demounting them.) I had to resort to using a tool I counsel others never to use, a screwdriver. Using a screwdriver to unmount a tire is asking to damage your tire, your rim, your inner tube or all three at once as well as your belief in any higher power except the devil. I couldn’t budge the damn bead. I needed Roger’s help even to insert the screwdriver blade between the rim wall and the tire to begin the process. The second time I struggled alone for about 20 minutes and then realized it was déjà vu. With Roger’s help our four hands were finally able to pull the tire sideways enough to nestle a screwdriver in there to begin to pop the bead out of the bead well.
If this had happened out on the road–both times we discovered his flat tire before going out for a ride–it would have been game over and I would have had to go home to get the van for him.
You might be thinking, “What’s a bead well??” This is a more recent “innovation”. It didn’t exist back in the day with traditional road rims. Those rims were pretty narrow, 14 to 17 mm inner width, which seems crazy narrow these days. Those rims didn’t need bead wells. I presume the addition of bead wells was due to tubeless tires and rims getting wider for gravel. The bead well is an indentation on both sides of the usual rim well so that the tire beads can drop into them and be held more securely; they will not pop out easily. And that’s why it’s hard to demount them, so it’s a mixed blessing. If you look at the diagram below, the rim on the left is a traditional rim: it’s got hooks, and nothing but a rounded inner surface. The middle and right images are rims with rim wells and bead wells. Both the rim well and the bead wells assist with tubeless tires, the former for demounting the tires and the latter for locking the bead in place and keeping it from blowing off the rim.
I’m all for safe wheels but this is taking things to an extreme and making flats user unfriendly. Of course you all know that you never have to deal with a flat when you use tire sealant, right? You can stop giggling now. You can chalk this up to the “pro-ification” of cycling, i.e. we should be emulating what professional bike racers use for equipment (or are told they must use). If you don’t have a pit crew, a personal mechanic, or a support car following you, well, good luck!
The Chain Letter 