We often get asked what tyres fit easily onto the NoTubes rims, and there are some combinations which just won’t work together. So we got together a big pile of NoTubes rims and Maxxis High Roller tyres, and spent an afternoon fitting and removing tyres.
Some of the new NoTubes rims (Crest, Alpine and Podium) have the “2nd generation bead socket” and are designed to be a tighter fit to the tyre. This improves tubeless performance but it means you’ll struggle to get UST tyres on – and with the Podium, it’s impossible.
The 2.35 single ply went onto Flow rims easily
Most tyres fitted easily to the Flow – the 14mm wide central channel easily accomodates both beads of the tyre when you’re trying to fit it. Most of the other rims have an 11mm channel, while the Alpine’s 10mm channel makes it just that bit harder to fit the tyre, especially as it’s combined with the new bead socket design.
Anyway, here are the results. The numbers show how hard it was to fit the tyre to the rim, as judged by me, using the best technique I could muster. All are High Roller, 60 to 70A compounds.
1: easy hand fit, 2: medium hand fit, 3: difficult hand fit
4: easy with tyre lever, 5: medium with tyre lever, 6: hard even with a tyre lever
X: did not fit.
| Kevlar | Wire | Tubeless | Dual ply | |||||
| 2.1 eXC | 2.35 Kev | 2.1 SPC | 2.35 SPC | 2.1 LUST | 2.35 LUST | 2.35 DPC | 2.5 DPC | |
| Podium | 2 | 2 | 3 | 3 | X | X | 5 | 5 |
| Alpine | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 4 |
| Olympic | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 |
| Crest | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 |
| 355 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 3 |
| Arch | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Flow | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
Remember that an easy fit is not necessarily good. For tyres to work well tubeless, they need to be a reasonably tight fit.
