Great test of different sealants in motorcycle tires

[neptronix]

Really good test here. They roll the tire over progressively bigger nails with each sealant.

I'm not surprised to see that slime came last in protection.

I imagine this translates to similar results in a bicycle tire.

 

[nicobie]

6.17 minutes of misery

 

[marka-ee]

These tests are rather useless and here's the reason:. These substances change their properties after a few days or weeks and the effective nature of what might work when it's brand new changes substantially. I have found this to be the case with slime and also Stans, which is a latex-based sealant. Stans turned to a milky substance that did little to do any puncture fixing.
A electric scooter of mine claims to have some kind of a gel inside of the tire, which so far for me has been working out. I haven't taken the tire off yet, as I haven't needed to, but I believe that if there is a layer of gel in the tubeless tire that has the consistency of a thick jello, not some kind of fluid, then this would be the ultimate solution. Liquids are complete BS in my opinion. It's got to be in a gel format. Gels don't get pushed out of a tire defect and also are obviously completely self-healing. Perfect. Whether anybody makes a gel that could be applied to the inside of a tire I have no idea I'd love to find one. In the spirit of this, I once tried to coat the inside of a tubeless tire with clear silicone sealer, but that didn't work out at all. I think it has to remain in some type of a tacky jelly type consistency to be effective.

 

[amberwolf]

As long as it's a sufficiently viscous thixotropic(?) gel, so it resists motion even when pulled down by gravity, and remains on the outer circumference all the time, regardless of temperature, it should work.

If it is not viscous enough, then over enough time or at a high enough temperature it may pool at the bottom, and if the valve is there it may clog that up, and it will also severely unbalance the wheel until it spins back out to the outer circumference (which might not be able to happen if the temperature drops to make it viscous enough to effectively become a solid...such as say, desert daytime temps in direct sunlight, vs desert nighttime temps, which can easily be 40-50F difference or more.


If you want to experiment, you can get very soft platsil from Smooth-On, and add silicone oil to the mix until it has just the properties you want. It's not cheap, though. There are probably other things you can use, but that's one I have had experience with to make molds for casting scifi prop parts and other stuff in and from.

 

[Chalo]

Liquids are complete BS in my opinion. It's got to be in a gel format. Gels don't get pushed out of a tire defect and also are obviously completely self-healing.

The least awful sealant I have any experience with is Flatout. It's. definitely not a gel-- more of a colloid. I don't think it's intended for high bicycle-like tire pressures, and I don't expect that of it. But it doesn't congeal or precipitate over time, and it does work.

Gels are not inherently self-healing. Try sticking gelatin or agar back together. Try coaxing a ruptured gel padded saddle into an uninterrupted surface again.

 

[neptronix]

These tests are rather useless and here's the reason:. These substances change their properties after a few days or weeks and the effective nature of what might work when it's brand new changes substantially.

But not all sealants are the same.

I second what Chalo said about flatout.. users claim it can last a decade in a tire.. it remains liquid-ish.. one of the few sealants that lasts.
Slime, Orange Seal, Stans are all known to coagulate.

Others? show me the evidence they suck, there's a lot of interesting materials engineering going on and you can't tell me something sucks w/o proof these days