How clean do you get your tubulars before re-gluing

[bikerboy337]

Do you clean down to bare rim again, or just give it a quick wipe down with acetone and re-glue the new tires on as long as there are no major clumps and bumps?

Thanks in advance!


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[oldpotatoe]

Do you clean down to bare rim again, or just give it a quick wipe down with acetone and re-glue the new tires on as long as there are no major clumps and bumps?

Thanks in advance!


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Yup, remove big glumps but otherwise what you said.

[Vamoots58]

literally bringing the rims back to perfectly clean and free of old glue. Brutal process! My last glue up, I ran a popsicle stick over the rim bed to remove any big clumps and re-glued. Seems to have worked fine, so not sure which route I'll go with the next glue up.

[oldpotatoe]

literally bringing the rims back to perfectly clean and free of old glue. Brutal process! My last glue up, I ran a popsicle stick over the rim bed to remove any big clumps and re-glued. Seems to have worked fine, so not sure which route I'll go with the next glue up.

Butter knife works too.

[El Chaba]

If the wheels have been around for a while you might also look at the residual glue and make sure that it hasn't gone "chalky"...If it has, it will brush away with a stiff brush and then glue away....

[rockdude]

I like my rims pretty clean to start a new foundation. Heat gun and scrap off all that I can. Then some mineral spirits to get the last bit off.

[etu]

spray googone
let it sit overnight
wipe of glue with rag or paper towel
learned it here and it really works!

[chiasticon]

literally bringing the rims back to perfectly clean and free of old glue. Brutal process!similar, but I'm only dealing with tubs for cx and they're cx-glued. my reasoning for removing glue so thoroughly is to get the tape off; at that point, might as well just finish it up and get the whole thing nice and clean. only have to do it about every two years anyway.

I found a heat gun does almost all of it for you. then I use contractor's solvent to wipe the remaining bits of glue off. aluminum rims though; not sure I'd take a heat gun to carbon...

[Gummee]

I've always been told that 'glue sticks better to glue than it does to AL' so I get the big bits off and re-glue.

HTH

M

[seanile]

im curious about how to get a clean tire surface for use with the efetto mariposa tape.

when you mount the tape on the rim you're supposed to put the tire on, then peel a strip of plastic off the tape from between it and the tire. but if there's glue on the tire, how is that supposed to work? the plastic strip is already pretty prone to breaking..

[Joxster]

I don't bother, life's too short :)

[frank_h]

im curious about how to get a clean tire surface for use with the efetto mariposa tape.

when you mount the tape on the rim you're supposed to put the tire on, then peel a strip of plastic off the tape from between it and the tire. but if there's glue on the tire, how is that supposed to work? the plastic strip is already pretty prone to breaking..

I'm also wondering the same. I have encountered this issue both when pulling off a tire with life remaining that was previously glued and ones that were glued.

Never felt comfortable with what to do with either to prep for a new tape job, so I had always cleaned the rim to as new as I could get it and tape up a new tire. But now I have usable(?) tires from removal jobs sitting that I'd like to cycle back in.

[11.4]

I'd suggest we distinguish, first of all, what kind of rims we're using. Recommendations involving strong solvents left on overnight or powered wire brushes may not work as well on carbon rims as on alloys.

The bottom line comes down to how we want to maintain our wheels. When I'm working with track wheels, which require very strong glue jobs, I might be doing 10-12 wheels in a sitting and typically pull the old tire off, check the glue on the tire and on the rim for loose bits, and take a box cutter and trim off the ridge of glue along the edge of the rim (more of a cosmetic step than anything, but I think it helps maintain a strong bond at the edge if there isn't a bunch of glue piled up there). If it's a road or cross tire exposed to wet, I make sure it's very clean and completely dry, and install the new tire. In these instances, as long as the glue job is good and there's no contamination and no peeling, there's no reason one can't have a dozen tires mounted before a cleaning job. A good glue base on the rim makes for a very good glue joint -- nothing about what glue sticks to better, but simply the glue has taken the shape of the tire and I get more consistent pressure against the rim bed. If the tires are being reused, I chip off any lumps and glue the tire until there's a good coat again, with the proviso that after chipping, on the first coat I use the new cement to help soften and smooth any remaining irregularities on the tire. It should look really even before the tire gets mounted. And that should address questions about using the Effeto tape in a reinstall as well.

The problems come mostly when the tire is contaminated with water or dirt. In these cases, one just has to strip all the glue off the rim and as much as possible off the tire. Once I've dumped a bunch of solvent on modern rim cement, I can't expect the rim cement to harden up like the original product would have. Rim cement is a colloid, a very complex suspension of compounds, and if you mess with how it's composed (which most solvents will do) it won't be the same. So once I hit it with solvent I really want to scrub it clean. And a lot of the solvent mixes and adhesive removers have mixes of different fractionation components, so there are some oily products that don't entirely evaporate leaving a clean surface. That means you can contaminate a mostly-done cement removal job with stuff that will damage the future glue job. The answer is to do an exhaustive cleaning job, right down to bright metal or carbon, and then rub off any slight remaining film or contamination with acetone (which does evaporate cleanly and will clean up almost all contaminants except some teflons, silicones, and so on. This means you don't want to use solvents to clean your tire base tape if you ever want to use the tire again. I'll pump a tire up until it inverts and is fairly hard, then take a stiff plastic bristle brush and water and mild soap to the base tape. That gets rid of pretty much all contamination. That tire needs to be completely clean and dry afterwards, which means lots and lots of warm-water rinsing followed by a week hanging in a dry room or a couple hours on a sweater drying rack inside a clothes dryer. If that doesn't get the tire clean enough to give a good tire bond, I'd relegate the tire for use as a spare under the saddle or preferably just cut it up for repair parts (casing, tube, etc.)

For carbon rims I'd use the same protocol for decontamination, plus finishing with acetone. Keep the acetone off any labels. For alloy rims, same precautions about labels but you can use a little more force if needed.

The bottom line is to manage glue contamination from water and dirt/mud, and reuse your glue job when you can. You can get a dozen glue jobs done before you have to strip and replace, but the stripping job isn't that much worse for twelve glue jobs compared to one. Mostly you just touch up and reactivate your glue job and you can move quickly and get a good bond. Cleaning introduces more risk of contamination and complications in the glue job than it solves.

Did that cover all the bases?

[RyanH]

I ride tubulars year around. That foundation of glue seems to make the glue job a lot stronger than gluing to a fresh rim. I got a new wheelset a few months back and had to take off the tire due to a slow leak about two months in. I was shocked at how easy it was to take the tire off compared to my "weathered" rims.

My vote is to leave the old glue there. From my experience of how difficult it is to pull tires off with a good foundation of glue, I don't see a downside.

[denapista]

Old Glue is good.. Going to a bare new rim each time seems like overkill IMHO... The old glue helps mend to the glue on the tire.. I just mounted a new set of Veloflex Arenberg (All Black). I have a set of gumwall Roubax tires I want to mount to give my all black bike some kind of color.. In this scenario, you're asking if you should go all the way back to a clean rim before mounting my Roubaix tires... That would be extra time consuming.. I'm simply going to put a nice layer on the Roubaix tires and mount them and let sit for 24hrs. I may do a really thin layer on the old glue on the rim for peace of mind, but you really shouldn't have to go all the way to a clean rim each time you glue tires.

The key is thin layers to begin with. not creating lumps in the initial gluing process..

[Ronsonic]

I like going over nasty ones with a brass wire wheel. Peels off everything down to a very thin, clean layer. Perfect to rebuild from.