“… like floating on a very speedy cloud”
It’s not visible, but the Confreries on the born-again Trek are now installed sans inner tubes. I have not had a chance to do a serious ride (for not wanting to have the tire spontaneously deflate 30 miles away from the nearest bike shop) but my initial impressions (over a couple of 1-5 mile loops) are that the good parts of the ride are doubled with no negative side-effects aside from worrying that the wheel will suddenly disassemble on me.
This is not an experiment that I’d recommend to someone who isn’t willing to spend a lot of time tinkering with their bicycle, because
- the beads on the Confreries stretch under load – I’ve got 700d cr-18 rims on this bicycle (which are too big for basically every other tire I’ve used) and when I push the tire pressure up to ~3.5 bar the tire stretches to latch itself onto the rim, and subsequently are easy to mount by hand on these oversized rims. If I was to use them on actual 650b rims, I would have to use a tubeless ready rim and maybe also use glue/rubber cement to seal the rims to the tires.
- the sidewalls are more porous that I’d like; so far every day I’ve come down in the morning to a pair of flat tires. They’re probably good for 4 hours before needing to pump the tires back to ~3.5 bar again, which means that they might not work for absent-minded randonneuring. Maybe a few weeks will see enough sealant soaking into the sidewalls to keep the things from gradually deflating every night.
But, damn, so far they seem to ride so ridiculously fast and smoothly they should be classified as an addictive drug.