Is Your Tubeless Setup Actually Ready to Ride?
Before your next ride, do one thing. Pick up your bike and shake or spin each wheel. If you can hear liquid sloshing around inside the tyre, you’re good. If you hear nothing your sealant has dried out and you’re essentially riding on empty.
It sounds simple because it is. But you’d be surprised how many riders turn up to the Worroi with bone dry sealant and no idea.
On the Sunshine Coast, tubeless setups need more attention than most riders realise. The heat and humidity that make the Sunshine Coast such a great place to ride year-round are exactly the same conditions that shorten your sealant’s life. What lasts three months in a cooler climate might be gone in four to six weeks over a Queensland summer. Sealant weeps through tyre sidewalls, tubeless tape lifts with temperature swings, and before long that flat you thought you were immune to has you walking three kilometres back to the carpark in thirty-five degree heat wondering what went wrong.
The good news is that staying on top of it takes almost no time at all.
Shake or spin your wheels before every ride — that sloshing check is your first line of defence. Top up your sealant every three months as a baseline, and move that to every four to six weeks through summer.
Check your tyre pressure weekly, because tubeless setups lose air slowly and the lower pressures that give you all that extra grip and comfort on the trail are only working for you if you’re actually running them correctly. A decent digital gauge is one of the better small investments you can make. Check out the Topeak Smartgauge D2x
The reason it’s worth bothering with at all comes down to this: lower pressures mean your tyre conforms to the trail rather than bouncing off it, which means more grip, more control and a more connected feeling through technical sections. Small punctures — the kind that end rides when you’re running tubes — seal themselves on the go. Most of the time you won’t even know it happened until you spot dried sealant on the sidewall or frame afterward.
But there’s a catch. Dry sealant doesn’t just stop protecting you — it makes you think you’re protected when you’re not. That false confidence is worse than knowing your setup needs attention, because it only reveals itself at the worst possible moment.
If you want to sort it yourself, Joe’s No Flats and Muc-Off both have solid how-to videos that walk you through the whole process. Grab the right sealant at Venture Cycles and you’re set.
If you’d rather just bring it in, we’re happy to check your sealant levels, top up and dial your pressures for the trails you’re actually riding.
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