Gravel History With Guitar Ted: Tubeless Gravel Tires

The Orange Crush set up with Clement (now Donnelly) USH tires.

Ten years ago we didn't have much of anything meant for gravel. There was one bike, (Warbird) and a few tires that were in the "gravel category" from Clement Tires (Now Donnelly) 

And there were no tubeless tires. 

Not a one for gravel travel. But that did not stop me, and a few others, like MG, from trying. We did it using our experiences with MTB tubeless tire set-ups, many of which were done with non-tubeless tires. 

Can you even imagine the world I am describing here? What with scads of tubeless tire options for gravel in so many sizes it makes your head spin, I wonder if most new folks to gravel can even relate to our situation back then. No gravel bikes, no gravel tires, yet we still were enamored of riding gravel. If that doesn't tell you something about this segment of cycling, I cannot get through to you. 

I'm not going to pull some "We had to walk uphill to school in 8 inches of snow." thing, but the reality is that we had to be a lot more resourceful in the earlier days of this modern gravel cycling deal. That's all. Tires were scarce for gravel, and tubeless was a gamble. I tried setting up some non-tubeless, folding bead Clement USH tires back then and struggled with that mightily until I finally got them to quit leaking down almost immediately. 

It took over a week to do that, and the tires didn't last much over that. I think I got two 3GR rides out of that set up. The 3GR was my "Gravel Grinder Group Ride - three "G's" ad an "R". Anyway, that would have been less than 100 miles, and then one of the tires developed a sidewall cut.

But that short-lived experiment was revealing. I decided right then and there that riding with tubes in my tires on gravel, at least with the typical butyl tubes, was not long for me. I was decidedly on the tubeless bandwagon then. The performance difference between running tubed and tubeless was astounding. 

It would be another three years, in 2015, before we'd get any tubeless gravel tires and then only one model from one brand was all you could get. The WTB Nano 40 TCS tire was that tire and from that company. Think about that a minute. Tubeless gravel tires weren't widely available until mid-2016. That's only six years ago now. 

Crazy.....