Does inner tube sealant work? As someone who works at a shop, I've always seen tube sealant as a bit of a gimmick, but I figured I'd test it out myself to see if it actually works.
This is one of those products that I think is hard for the everyday person to know if it actually works or not. You may put it in your tubes, but you'll never know if it worked.
In this video I'm sacrificing a few inner tubes in the great pursuit of knowledge.
I'm testing out two different products. Slime and Muc-Off Inner Tube Sealant.
As someone who owns and has worked in a bicycle shop for the better part of a decade, the few times I have encountered slime tubes, I've cussed up a storm. It gets everywhere, it's tough to clean, and didn't seem to save the tube, hence why it was brought to me to change the tube. It's an oil based product and is quite thick. I've heard second hand from other people that the slime sealant clogs up valves making it hard to air up the tube. I have no personal experience with it outside of that. Even though I had some personal animosity towards it, I still wanted to test it for what it's made for...filling punctures.
Muc-Off Inner Tube Sealant, is relatively new on the market. It was released around 2020. Muc-Off offers one of my favorite ''tubeless" sealants, and they have a great product range with lubricants and cleaners. I was very hopeful that if they put a product out with their name on it, that it would work, and it would work well.
In the video, I puncture the inner tubes with 4 different objects. A staple, a paper clip, a pen head, and a wood screw. These range in widths from half a millimeter to 5 millimeters.
Both sealants would ideally work a lot better in a tube inflated to proper pressure and also rolling. As you can see in the video, I have to shake the tube around a lot for the sealant to fill the hole. In a real life scenario, the sealant would be rolling around in the tube as the wheel is spinning, making it easier for the sealant to find and seal the hole. But for the sake of the experiment and to actually see what was going on. I over inflated the inner tube and tested it out.
Each tube was filled up with 100ml of sealant, which is the suggested amount for this tube size. The tubes were over inflated, and punctured.
While both products sealed up small holes with ease. Muc-Off proved to be the main one that would seal up larger holes. It is advertised to fill holes up to 4mm wide. With this test, it was able to seal a hole 5mm wide. I was able to test the tube the next morning to see if it actually sealed, and it did.
Slime was able to fill all of the holes but the screw hole, still very impressive.
I weighed an inner tube without sealant and with 100ml of sealant, as you can see in the video, the different was only 2oz. You'd be looking at an additional 4oz of weight if you had sealant in both wheels. This seems like a worthy sacrifice if the sealant does it's job and helps prevent flats.
Be sure to check out my instagram and jeff.likes.bikes
You can find my shop at www.Bildabike.com, located in sunny Charleston, South Carolina.
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