ride joe ride

I recently had the good fortune to be able to buy essentially a whole mid-80s racing component setup for my favorite bike — the Paletti on which I recently rode my first century. The fact that I have switched to gears is a whole other post itself, but for now I’m focusing on the nice Mavic wheels that came as part of the set. For better or worse, these wheels are designed for tubular tires — also known as “sew-ups” or “tubs.” Basically, unlike what we now think of a normal tire, a clincher, tubs are held on the wheel by glue. Sheldon has a breakdown of their pros and cons here.

I have a tendency to pick the harder way to do things on occasion, but honestly tubs have always seemed to be too much of a pain. As the dude at Yellow Jersey Cycles notes, this is probably because the internet is really flooded with foo about how horrible they are as far as gluing and repairing flats, and how they aren’t worth it. Most of this is written by people who don’t and often haven’t ever actually used tubular tires.

What you tend to find when researching tubs is two distinct groups: people who have been using them for decades who love them, and people who hate them (often without having actually ever used one). So I am something of an unusual group. I don’t have any burning desire to run them, but I do have a set of really nice wheels which I can use if I can deal with them. So I see the opportunity for an experiment here. I’m going to try the tubs out and post my experience here. I don’t have any serious tubular evangelism in me. If they drive me nuts, I’ll dump them and explain why.

So to start off, here’s how I rode to work on them today. The wheels came with a set of Continental Sprinter 250s glued on — a pretty good set of tires. They weren’t worn much at all, but the rear tire was deflated. In an effort to see how hard it really is to repair a tub, I pulled the flatted tire last night to investigate. After tearing into the sewed up tire carcass, I quickly saw the problem: the valve stem had separated at the base. This is normally the sort of thing one tosses a tube for, as repairing the valve base is a royal pain — and it doesn’t normally work. Not to be deterred, I pulled off the faulty stem, cut the valve stem from a spare tube, and glued it into place. A little dental floss to sew the tire back up, and then remounted it sans glue (as I will probably pull it off again soon). Total repair time was probably 20 minutes. Not bad considering that this is the equivalent of brain surgery as far as tire repair goes.

The tire held 120psi overnight, so I figured it was safe to ride this morning. It was raining when we went out for the morning 16 miler, so I skipped riding the Paletti. I did ride it the couple of miles here to work without incident, so I am calling day #1 at least a 50% success (I have to make it home after all.) Impressions on differences in riding compared to clinchers will follow.