Probably not, but here’s what happened…

I set up some new wheels for my partner on Friday, with tubeless 40mm Terrene tyres on Stans Crests.

Wrestled the tyres onto the rims (eventually, being Stans), with the help of some soapy water. One then went up with a trackpump straight away. But no luck with the other — 5 mins of frantic pumping did nothing, even with the value core removed.

I was going to go to the next stage of putting in a tube to at least get one bead seated, but figured that as most of the air was (obviously) escaping from near the value, I would see what happened if I just sealed that bit better.

So I wrapped my hand around the rim and tyre right where the value is — so my fingers were through the spokes and my palm pressing both sidewalls onto the rim both sides of the value  — and gave a few blasts one-handed with the track pump. It went up immediately even though my one-handed pumping was obviously very slow.

This is a very simple and subtle technique, but I’ve not come across it before.The basic principle is to put the sidewalls in contact with the rim in order to hold air while the tyre bead is migrating outwards. A more sophisticated way of implementing it would be to tie a number of elastic bands around the rim/tyre which sealed the sidewall/rim but which stretched as soon as the bead began to lock.

Obviously all this is only relevant for people that can’t be bothered to buy a compressor…

Done similar with a ratchet strap. Also fitted one by putting pegs on the sidewall to pull the bead to the rim. The pegs came off with a fair old snap when it went up.

Done it with the ratchet strap as well.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t

Gave in and bought an airshot recently.  Wish I’d done it years ago, solves the faff

That pegs idea sounds good.

I’m not at all surprised that other people use a similar idea to temporarily seal the sidewall-rim, but what does surprise me is that this isn’t right at the top of things to try if you’re having trouble getting the bead to seat.

For me, just holding the rim/tyre with my hand as I did made a massive difference immediately and involved no hassle at all.

I’ve heard of people doing it with old toe straps before. I guess the key is finding the bit that’s leaking the most….

Yeah, done that before, only worked on a couple of combinations though.

I seat one both beads with a tube and take it out.

Set up the valve etc and start pumping as i pull the loose side onto the rim which achieves similar in sealing it enough to blow the rest on.

Still getting an airshot though.

I’ve done it by just rotating the valve to the bottom of the wheel and pushing the tyre against the floor

I had a frustrating tyre that wouldn’t go up last week, in several years I’ve never needed any more than a track pump, and if its not playing ball, a break and a cup of tea seems to work well.

But this time I found myself looking at airshot type stuff or DIYing a fire extinguisher.  Until I remembered I had one of those garden weedkiller pump up sprayers.  Pumped it up, took the nozzle off the end and used a few wraps of insulation tape to make the valve larger.  Worked a treat 🙂

I’ve metioned before on here holding the tyre around the valve to stop air escaping from there… Probably about 4 years ago if you want to check my history 😉

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.  There are a whole bunch of ‘tricks’ to try.  I used to use a garden sprayer as well and that often fixed it but not always.

…but an airshot fixed it all 🙂

My usual setup technique is try to inflate with track pump.  If fail, try to inflate after organising and squishing tyres (as above). If fail, resort to 7up bottle inflator.  Still going strong after 3 years and hasn’t failed me yet.

No. I was shown this 8 years ago and sometimes still use it.

Use this all the time as my rims are assymetric so getting the beads in around the value is a pain