Tuesday, December 15, 2009

What's the Best Way to Glue Tubulars?....

The best way is to just ask Bobby Phillips and he does them for you, with plenty of years of experience and not rolling a tire yet, he is the man. What's the fun in that though? and so after getting him to do the new FFWD Disc, I went away and had the F9R's to glue.

After much investigation on various websites and through discussing the practice with loads of people I ended up following the Park Tools guide. After stretching the tire for a few days, I armed myself with glue, brushes, latex gloves and the old yardwork clothes and went to work with the following approach:

1) Glue the rim and let dry overnight.
2) Glue the tire bead and let dry.
3) Next day: Apply 2nd glue on rim and let dry.
4) Apply the 3rd and final coat of glue to the rim and while still tacky work the tire onto the rim.
5) After aligning the tire, pump to full pressure and roll hard along the ground to get a good contact.

The front tire was a S.O.B to get onto the rim, even with the two days of stretching. At one point I was wondering if I was even going to get it on....perhaps I need to get to the gym more!

So both tires are now on, they are pumped and ready to rock.......I haven't ridden them yet and I am sure the first time out will be a bit caution praying that I glued them properly. Rolling a tire on brand new carbon rims (or any rim for that matter) would not be cool :-(

2 comments:

Bryan Vaughan said...

TUFO Extreme Tape. Once you use it, you will never go back to glue. I'm over 190lbs and raced full-out crits on Zipps with taped tires and they work great!

TerribleTerry said...

Bryan- How much "over" man?...I'm expecting great things this year.