How to Fix a Tubeless Tire

24 June 2023/in Gear Review, mountain biking/by Conor Hurley

Have you gotten a bad puncture while out riding? Tubeless tires can be repaired rather than replaced. Here’s how to fix a tubeless tire.

Plugs work. A puncture struck 10 kilometers into a ride. This hole took three plugs to hold air and lasted for the remaining 130km of a gravel ride.

Plugs are a temporary fix. They’re super useful in that you can stuff one into a hole to repair a puncture without having to take the wheel off the bike. However, they’ll eventually work themselves out. The trick to getting a plug to hold is to make sure there is more plug inside the tire than there is on the outside…kind of intuitive, right?

The plug, cleaned up and ready to be replaced with a patch.

How the plugs look inside the tire.

Repair Process

-Wash the wheel and remove the tire, pour the remaining sealant into a sealable container—it can be reused.

-Rinse off the inside of the tire and dry with a rag.

-Scrape away any dried sealant from the tire surface around the hole.

-Rough the tire surface around the hole with sand paper.

-If the hole is big enough or in the side wall, stitch it up to reinforce the patch.

-Apply tube repair glue to the area around the hole and let it dry for a couple of minutes.

Ready for the patch.

-Place the patch over the glue and clamp to a flat surface.

Patched tire clamped to a flat sureface.

-Leave the tire clamped for a few hours.

-Inspect the patch, add more glue around the edges if necessary and re-clamp. If you’re satisfied with the patch, remount the tire and go for a ride!

Not the prettiest patch, but it hold air. The puncture was on the edge of the tread, thus the patch got a bit twisted when it was clamped.

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