I often read reviews of bikes with tubeless wheels and tyres, that aren’t set up tubeless when you buy them. My CX was like that.
Tubeless set up isn’t particularly easy, especially for the home mechanic. I’ve certainly struggled and ended up building things out of coke bottles etc.
Surely a bike factory could do it easily, so why not? To do with transport? or is that tubeless technology is still pretty jury-rigged, even if they all have fancy acronyms for their technologies?

same reason they rarely are sold with pedals.

Given most bikes come with inappropriate tires on and the first thing I’d do is change them, I’m quite glad they don’t.

(IMO there is a trend towards selling bikes with lighter faster tires than you’d actually want on a bike in the category to keep showroom weight down).

Deflate too quickly when sitting on the shop floor.

Also, the goop settles to the bottom if they’re on display for a while.

By the time the bikes have been built, shipped to the dealer, the sealant will have dried out. Shop selling the bike should do it once the sale is completed, bikes are sold tubeless ready (Whyte tape the rims and include valves)

Giant road bike (mid to upper end) come with tubeless wheels/tires/strips and valves fitted. We just add stans sealant (badged as Giant and supplied with bikes) and inflate when the bike is built/pdi for a customer

you don’t want to install sealant and leave a bike on a shop floor for 3 months, or worse install in the Taiwanese factory and then have it sitting in a box for 8 months

Tubeless needs to be set up and then taken for a ride to get the sealant into all of the nooks and crannies. Plus if left to sit in a tyre it will pool at the bottom and will eventually “go off”.

Bikes can be sat in a warehouse for months if not years. And it’s easier to assemble wheels with tubes in the factory. Nothing wins except profit, IE: press fit BBs.

Tubeless set up isn’t particularly easy, especially for the home mechanic

Eh, even with tubeless tyres, rims, proper tape & valves? ???

Got mine from Leisure Lakes and it came set up tubeless, so guess it depends what you’re getting and where you’re getting it from.

tubeless set up is easy, you’re doing it wrong.

Funny when you buy Mavic wheels – already tubeless compatible without faffing about with tape – they come with tr tyres, sealant and valves. But fitted with inner tubes. Always presumed they’re catering for the luddites.

my kona came taped and had tubeless valves but no sealant

I suppose its important you learn how to do it yourself

Bird bikes arrive tubeless with an appropriate amount of tyre jizz in.

cultsdave – Member
Bird bikes arrive tubeless with an appropriate amount of tyre jizz in.

Aye, but they customise and build them to order in the UK, as opposed to shipping pre-built bikes from Asia

esher shore – Member
Giant road bike (mid to upper end) come with tubeless wheels/tires/strips and valves fitted. We just add stans sealant (badged as Giant and supplied with bikes) and inflate when the bike is built/pdi for a customer

whereas their £3.5k MTB’s come setup with tubeless rims, conventional tape and tubes and a bag with the tubeless tape and valves, and no sealant.

I was quite happy to tape the rims and setup with sealant, and I’m sure LBS would have done it if I had asked, but I was keen to know how to do it, as was my first venture into tubeless 🙂

Bird bikes arrive tubeless with an appropriate amount of tyre jizz in.

Slightly different in that Bird do a custom build to order, they don’t get a factory in Taiwan to assemble them.

I’d expect most bikes bought from a decent shop to come set up tubeless, in the same way I’d expect them to come with handlebars on.

But if you mail-order an off the shelf bike from a shop then often the shop just ships the bike on to you straight from the distributor without taking it out the box (or setting up the tyres, or putting the bars on).

Presumably it’s just timing, you don’t want 1000 boxes of bikes with flat tyres and frames covered in dried on leaked jizz.

Hassle factor and choice.

Yup. Couldn’t get a Schwalbe S-One on to a DT Swiss rim with any track pump or my coke bottle set up. 3 different track pumps at LBS couldn’t do it and their compressor struggled. We had to hack up a nozzle for it.

The vittoria I’ve got on the front worked better but leaked air for a couple of weeks no matter how many times I basketball bounced it or shoogled it about and left it lying on its side over the bath etc.

I was never succesful with a pair of superstar “tubeless” wheels. Always had a leak through the rim somewhere.

Look how many threads on here there about folk struggling with it.

Suggests to me that the technology isn’t quite there yet.

I can imagine tubeless being a big seller for higher end commuter bikes. No inner tube = no punctures. But the faff would put a lot of people off. Surely they’d just want it to “work” so they can ride to work

Eh, even with tubeless tyres, rims, proper tape & valves? ???

4/5 rim/tyre combo’s are easy … its the remaining ones

Frankly I’d welcome ship without tyres as its really only marginally more likely you’ll want them than pedals on a UK wise basis

I’d certainly have different tyres if I lived in the North and riding sharp gritstone or lakeland volcanics… but same between say FOD and BPW

I wince several times a ride when I’m running cheese sidewalls in East Lancs -I just got away with a rip in the sidewall on the last trip (as in it managed to seal itself)

Depends on where you buy them from. The two bike shops I use will ask if you want it setting up for you when you order the bike from them.

Possibly because bikes are air-shipped into the country, and airline rules used to dictate that you had to deflate the tyres.

Last box fresh bike I bought had under inflated tyres.

It’s an outrage!

My Orbea Occam came with the correct rim tape fitted and the tubeless valves in a box. Other than supplying the sealant I reckon that’s as far as the supplier should go. Not everyone wants to run tubeless.

Scotroutes +1

There will always be knuckle draggers people who prefer a tubed setup. 😉

Once a tyre has been filled with goo it’s hard to go back to tubes.

I am a full on tubeless fan boy but if I was into changing tyres regularly and I rode somewhere less thorny I’d possibly still be on tubes. They have their place, just not for my riding.

I think it’s fair to say that it’s easy if you have a (homebrew or otherwise) air reservoir, and remove the valve cores.

Air reservoirs aren’t (yet) in the “standard” home tool kit, which does make setting up tubeless a potential PITA for the buyer.

^^^^ I just remembered the other night at Mugdock, when fixing a puncture with an anchovy, that I had a packet of them in my bag the other week when you had to put a tube in and get eaten by midges…. sorry 🙂

I bought my Solaris new from a shop

Came with pedals and was already set up tubeless

I bought a Lap once that was ‘tubless’ LUST tyres, rim tape and valves, but no sealant – they said you didn’t need it – but by god you did, 2 months of constant flats I swore I’d never go tubeless again and haven’t. I should really, but I seem to get around to it roughly the same time as I ding a rim.

The original UST tyres weren’t supposed to need sealant… but you’d be a bit of a doof to ride without it! 😉

LUST tyres dont need sealant to stay up but if you get a puncture then, erm, air will come out.

2 months of constant flats

and you didn’t try putting any sealant in ?

swore I’d never go tubeless

so presumably went back to tubes that also go down when punctured?

Confused

ndthornton – Member

LUST tyres dont need sealant to stay up but if you get a puncture then, erm, air will come out.

2 months of constant flats

and you didn’t try putting any sealant in ?

swore I’d never go tubeless

so presumably went back to tubes that also go down when punctured?

Confused

Ah, no, not exactly.

So my brand new £3500 bike (which was superbike money back then, sorta) arrived with UST tyres, rims, valves etc – tubeless was around then, but wasn’t nearly a mainstream as it is now. You spend that much and you expect it to be the ways things should be.

Back then people still talked about ‘Ghetto Tubeless’ using all sorts of stuff, and UST was the new, no-gloop standard that was supposed to revolutionise it all. If you read anything relating to it from Mavic, Maxxis et al, you didn’t use sealant – that was ‘the old way’. So I didn’t.

They’d either advise to run a lower PSI or sell it as an advantage depending whose bumf you were reading so for me that meant a 30psi rear and a 25ish front. Start riding – happy enough, going from bike to bike meant I never really knew how much of the difference was down to the bike and how much down to the lack of tubes.

Get into some rough stuff, usually a section of berms and you’ve burped the front or back almost immediately and lose a bit of pressure, with the lower pressure it burps more and more to the point you’re running on flat tyres. Take armfuls of shit from your riding mates about your useless geeky tyres not working.

Speak to bike shop “run more pressure” okay, so back to my usual pressure, tyres burp less, but still do, “run more pressure” okay, well now I’ve got less reliable tyres and I’ve got to run more pressure than I did before which is sort of the exact opposite of the point of them.

Okay, this isn’t working – speak to bike shop – “run sealant” but back then, tubeless was less of a science than it is now lots of people were still finding themselves scraping handfuls of glue out of their tyres trailside so they could jam a tube in to keep going and “stopping the tyre burping” wasn’t really stated as a benefit of the sealant so I never wanted to run sealant.

So, I went home to the land of the Luddite, took out the valves, installed a pair of cheap tubes and didn’t need to touch them again for the rest of that bike’s time with me other than to change tyres when they wore out. 3 bikes later, I still use tubes as a pretty much maintenance free solution.

Again, at the time, the world (or the internet) was still heavily weighted towards tubes – tubeless worked best with lighter riders (of which I am not) because they could now run lower pressures, those of use in the 16st gang who ran higher pressures anyway, rarely, if ever pinch flatted and some bright spark weighed the contents of a bottle of sealant and a pair of tubes and declared the supposed weight advantage as being a lie all things considered. So at that point the dye was cast.

I’ve considered it again a few times since, but really, given the limited amount of time I get to myself and the almost total reliability I’ve had from ‘old fashioned’ tubes I’ve never bothered, the closest I got was a few months ago, I picked up a slow puncture, ignored it for a while when I shouldn’t have and pinch flatted heavily at BPW – of course I dinged the rim at the same time making it not exactly an ideal candidate for a tubeless conversion so haven’t bothered. It’s the first time I’ve had a puncture in 3 years from memory.

Ironically the mate who berated me the most about my ‘geeky tyres’ has recently gone tubeless, although with a combination of tubeless rims, tyres and sealant – he still has more hassle with it than I do with my Lud-Tubes, but not nearly as much as I did back then.

I’ll go tubeless one-day, probably about 15 mins after they stop selling tubes.