Tubeless – a nice, but expensive upgrade, right? Wrong.  Here’s how to upgrade your wheels to tubeless for around 40 dollars – retail, or you could not read this and spend 400 dollars on a new wheelset.

Here’s what you’ll need:

-Bottle of Stans or similar sealant: 25$ (this quantity should keep you in sealant for at least 3 sets of wheels…)

-2 20″ presta valve tubes (or schrader, if your rim is drilled for schrader valves): 10 – 15$

-Scissors: free, if you dig around your desk and drawers of random stuff.

Here’s how you set up ghetto tubeless:

Fillet the tube open, cutting along the seam opposite of the valve core, so that you have a flat, circular rubber strip.

Lay it into the rim.  You can lay it in with the rim naked, with electrical tape covering up spoke holes, or with your original rim strip in place.  I’ve seen success with all methods, but I’d recommend leaving the rim strip in place.

Make sure the strip is centered on the rim, with equal amounts flapping up and over the edge of the rim.

Mount one bead of your tire (you don’t have to use a UST tubeless tire, but their larger beads do make life easier once you need to seal the tire up.)

Pour the appropriate amount of sealant (see bottle’s instructions) into the open tire, and mount the other bead onto the rim, being careful not to drag the tube back into the rim.

Once the tire is fully mounted, ensure the tube is hanging out of the rim on all sides. If the tube strip has pulled back inside the tire anywhere, simply pull up the tire w/ a tire iron and fish the tube out until it is again draping over the sidewall of the rim.

Pull up on the tire, pulling the bead into the hooks of the rim.  Pull up the rubber up and away from the hub to help it seat into the bead hooks.  Doing this evenly around the entire wheel will help the whole tire seal when you finally pump it up.

Now pump like hell or fill up with a compressor.  Floor pumps that push more volume than high pressure (big, thick diameter pumps) are better here.

It’s likely that you will have leakage, and you just have to rotate the tire around to swish the sealant over the small leaks. Put your ear to the intersection of rim and tire to hear where air is escaping. .   Once you get the leaks stopped, and it may take a couple tries – you have a tubeless wheel, all for the cost of a couple tubes and a couple minutes.  Some tires work better than others, and you may have to repeat the pumping, sealing, swishing process a couple times to get it right.  But the cost and the benefit of never getting a pinch flat again are so, so worth it.

Now go get tubeless and get rad.