I’ve used windex to lube the tire/rim interface, mostly because the bottle is sitting within arm’s reach of my pump. And I’ll pump the tire up to near the max pressure and let it sit in the basement overnight. It’s always seated by morning. Sometimes I can hear it snap into place from upstairs.
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Anything under 48 or 2.0 can be real hit or miss with seating and holding air, especially 32s and 35s
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I had this exact problem last night mounting a Schwalbe Green Marathon on an Alex Adventurer II. I solved the problem by replacing the cloth rim strip with a single wrap of tubeless tape. I think it would have been fine if the cloth strip was narrower, but it went bead to bead and was just too thick to allow the tire to slip up onto the bead shelf.
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IMO you can exceed max pressure when installing a tire to seat the bead. Just don’t ride on it…
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Has anyone here been into a shop IRL lately? 650 is getting scarce. I’m going to load up like I do on Magura brake pads cause none of my LBS options are going anywhere south of 700c. If you live around corner from Golder Pliers, you might be ok, but otherwise stock up accordingly you freaks.
The shop I go to still has some 650 gravel and 27.5 mountain tires, but they’ve been hanging up there for quite a long time.
There are still a handful of new bikes running those wheel sizes. Cannondale Treadwell is 650b.
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Eh. The shops in Metro Detroit don’t even know what 650b is.
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Let’s be real outside of internet nerds and people who still ride nice mountain bikes from 15 years ago no one cares about 650b.
I say this as someone on the shorter side. 650b sucks and 29er tires are sweet.
you don’t feel like the larger wheels make geometry too front-forward? I feel like small sizes + large wheels leads to steep STA, lots of toe overlap
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Toe overlap has never been a problem for me. Maybe it’s because some of my old track bikes nearly had crank overlap.
Steep STA is good for how I like bikes to feel.
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I have two 650 bikes and one 700 bike and they all ride great.
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I still very much like my 650b bike
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I can’t believe mainstream 650b didn’t even make it 10 years. I mean, I can, but it’s disappointing.
Complete lack of new tires in 650bx42 and for all the variety almost nothing good in 650bx48. We got what? Maybe 3 generations of tires that was it?
With the resurgence of XC-tires as gravel marginal gains I was hopeful for some small piece of continued relevance with 27.5x2.1 Thunder Burts actual size fitting between 50-52 and 27.5x2.2 Race Kings fitting at 53-55. The hassle of setting up an alternative wheelsize to run significantly faster tires couldn’t be overcome when the sport is a pastiche of road racing with all the gear requirements and social pressure to mold around outdated performance ideals.
And another thing, as much pissing and moaning has been had online for years about new top-spec gravel race bikes released with bottom brackets perhaps 3-5mm “too high” you’d think people would be more amendable to a smaller wheelsize that allows both faster tires and lowers the bottom bracket for a double punch of increasing stability while preserving agility when it matters.
This is the same issue as everything else. Only one number can be fixed focus for consideration. So smaller wheels = bad, lower bottom bracket = good, but these ideas can’t ever meet together. Imagine the consternation that will be had when graveleros finally apply the outcome of trendy shorter cranks = saddle goes up which means effective bottom bracket height is higher. The fact that nobody, yet, is feeling any handling degradation provides illustration of how much of a farce the whole thing can be, at times.
In the end, 650b needed a champion. When conditions were finally right for one to appear, the most prominent figure carrying the torch vocally for almost 20 years turned around and did all his racing and publicly-lauded record setting on 26" wheels.
This may seem ironic, but for anyone who was paying attention before Road Plus, it was always clear 650b was going to reach a higher peak than it could sustain. Eventual regression to the mean was baked in, from the first issue of Vintage Bicycle Quarterly.
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Yeah, and existing tyres disappearing (I’m look at you, Boken Plus) means I start to worry that soon it’ll just be down to ruuny arse and grand bois. I like hetres, but the Australia tax makes them not really budget-friendly. At what point do I start stockpiling so I can ride my NFE indefinitely?
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boken plus are going away? damn
I only found a few places online that had them in 42. Can’t even order them from IRC.
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Like two years ago.
I bought the only pair of boken 42s I could find online and when they wear out, I think I’ll be S O L.
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Chasing the mtb market was the mistake; why fuck around with 650b when 700c is better for obstacles? And for road or rando, who, aside from retrogrouches, wants to ride tiny fat tires?
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okay so you guys are saying don’t get my Rock Lobster in 650b tyreway in 11 months from now, thank you
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I would bet that for every one 650b tire sold a dozen 700c are sold. The same for bikes that come OEM with the two wheelsizes. Imagine you are Continental and only have space for new molds for two tires this year. Why would you limit your market by making that new tire in 650b when you could offer the same tire the more popular in 700x40 and 700x45 sizes.
At the end of the day every 650b Deore 10 Journeyer I’ve sold was sold on the color alone; no normies care about tire size.
I would also bet that the only reason 650b was able to fake market share it did was because its easy enough to make a bike ‘650b compatible’ when designing for larger 700c tires.