Is is worth spending a few quid on rim strips or do BMX tubes work just as well? What about Insulation tape, foam and a valve..?

What is your experience?

NB I have used Stans rims before which were ace but don’t have the luxury this time

What rims are they? I got away with just the tape and a valve cut from an old tube on mavic 717s

Exactly those….

I have a few tubes. Going to scav some duct tape and have a go. Where is that sealant. *checks shed

Ghetto can work just as well but it’s more hit and miss IME. Sometimes it’s faultless, other times, it just won’t work.

I’ve found ghetto set ups to ‘hold air better’ on the rim side of things – I’ve got rim strips that just seem to leak around the valve area. It does seal with latex in there, but gunks up the spoke nipples a lot…

DrP

I’ve currently got just electrical tape and some valves in some DT 470 rims. Had to use an old BMX tube cut to look like a stans strip in my mavic en521’s. Just seems to depend how ‘tight’ the rims are as to how much padding they need. Even using lots of tape through only added about 40g so I suspect it’s within 10g of doing it with cut up tube just wraping the rim in electrical tape untill the tyre seals.

BMX tubes is cheaper in the short term but I have found that unless I leave “flaps” then I need a new one evertime I change the tyre or need to take it off the rim.

Rim strips (on my other bike) work really well and seem like a much neater solution.

I never got a good result from BMX tubes on 717s, though it did feel like I was getting there- tbh by that time I’d spent more than enough time on it and had enough hassle on the trails with tyres rolling off rims.

I’ve never noticed any difference in performance between the two, but I’ll second jonba in that rim strips are reusable, whereas I’ve only once managed to reuse a BMX tube; normally they just fold themselves into the middle and you’ll never get them to stay up on the edges again.

BMX tubes is cheaper in the short term but I have found that unless I leave “flaps” then I need a new one evertime I change the tyre or need to take it off the rim.

I don’t get it? I cut my BMX tubes so that they’re the same size as stans strips. The only issue i’ve had is over a couple of years they split arround the circumfance which sometimes is an issue, other times it remains sealed.

Very dissapointed in genuine rim strips, used 20″ tubes as my ghetto version which were faultless till about a month ago when I had 2 burping incidents.

The genuine ones let go on my front wheel in a fast berm- ouch!

20″ tubes are way better – I’ve got stans rim strips if you want them;)