(Rant warning) Rene Herse tires poorly designed for tubeless?

[RWL2222]

Originally Posted by Jan Heine

First of all, we're always sorry when customers have issues with the products we sell. We work hard, and so do our suppliers, to minimize these as much as possible.

Tubeless is an emerging technology, with no standards yet. We're working with the ASTM and ISO to establish standards that hopefully will ensure compatibility in the future. As others have noted, the same tires work great on some rims, and are a terribly loose fit on others. That indicates it's not the tires, but the rims, that are the issue. This affects not just our tires –*somebody posted a link to Simworks, and I know Schwalbe has similar concerns.

There simply is a huge variability in rims these days. At one end, high-end carbon rims like Enve and Zipp are tight-fitting, and if we make our tires any smaller, they won't go on at all.

At the other end, many OEM rims that come on production bikes are undersized. Some of that is intentional –*it makes mounting tires much easier at the big factories that assemble the bikes – and some of it is just due to tolerances. The high-end rims have tight tolerances – they are all pretty much the same –*but the OEM rims are made to much looser standards. And since a rim that's too big is a no-go – the tire won't go on – most rim makers err on the side of making them smaller, when in doubt. (Imagine if you've got 5000 wheelsets at the factory for assembly into bikes, and you find out that the tires don't go on!)

Generally, the more supple a tire, the more demanding it is to mount, especially tubeless. So if you've got any doubts about your rims, we recommend the Endurance or Endurance Plus versions... The Endurance rolls as fast as our Standard casing – which means as fast or faster than any other tire in the industry – so it's a great choice for all-round riding. This doesn't mean that you can't run an Extralight tubeless, but it requires a rim that is just the right size and a little more care in setup.

Thank you to all who've chimed in. We're working hard to bring some standards into this crazy situation.

Jan Heine
Rene Herse Cycles

Nicely done response! I would try RH tires without hesitation. How many of the bashers have built a business and advanced a new and innovative product?

[pottshead]

Originally Posted by RWL2222

Nicely done response! I would try RH tires without hesitation. How many of the bashers have built a business and advanced a new and innovative product?

No hesitation? Idk the prospect of having my front tire blow off going 40 miles per hour definitely gives me pause. I like a lot of what Jan and RH are doing, but I don’t think we should minimize the danger of a tire failure like some people here are describing.

[RWL2222]

Originally Posted by pottshead

No hesitation? Idk the prospect of having my front tire blow off going 40 miles per hour definitely gives me pause. I like a lot of what Jan and RH are doing, but I don’t think we should minimize the danger of a tire failure like some people here are describing.

No minimizing that blow-out risk, but the OP and others attribute that to RH in particular.

[Spdntrxi]

I've used :

Barlow pass
Bon Jon pass
Juniper ridge
Stielacoom

Extralight casing and normal casings.. all setup tubeless with no huge issues. Maybe a dot of sealant on the sidewall at most. The have been great for the most part.

If my tires leaked like the ones pictured..I'd probably not buy them again to be honest. My threshold for tubeless is low... I won't faff too long with them.. bye-bye Enve tires.

[pottshead]

Originally Posted by RWL2222

No minimizing that blow-out risk, but the OP and others attribute that to RH in particular.

You don’t hear about it happening with Panaracer very often...

[mtechnica]

Originally Posted by Jan Heine

First of all, we're always sorry when customers have issues with the products we sell. We work hard, and so do our suppliers, to minimize these as much as possible.

Tubeless is an emerging technology, with no standards yet. We're working with the ASTM and ISO to establish standards that hopefully will ensure compatibility in the future. As others have noted, the same tires work great on some rims, and are a terribly loose fit on others. That indicates it's not the tires, but the rims, that are the issue. This affects not just our tires –*somebody posted a link to Simworks, and I know Schwalbe has similar concerns.

There simply is a huge variability in rims these days. At one end, high-end carbon rims like Enve and Zipp are tight-fitting, and if we make our tires any smaller, they won't go on at all.

At the other end, many OEM rims that come on production bikes are undersized. Some of that is intentional –*it makes mounting tires much easier at the big factories that assemble the bikes – and some of it is just due to tolerances. The high-end rims have tight tolerances – they are all pretty much the same –*but the OEM rims are made to much looser standards. And since a rim that's too big is a no-go – the tire won't go on – most rim makers err on the side of making them smaller, when in doubt. (Imagine if you've got 5000 wheelsets at the factory for assembly into bikes, and you find out that the tires don't go on!)

Generally, the more supple a tire, the more demanding it is to mount, especially tubeless. So if you've got any doubts about your rims, we recommend the Endurance or Endurance Plus versions... The Endurance rolls as fast as our Standard casing – which means as fast or faster than any other tire in the industry – so it's a great choice for all-round riding. This doesn't mean that you can't run an Extralight tubeless, but it requires a rim that is just the right size and a little more care in setup.

Thank you to all who've chimed in. We're working hard to bring some standards into this crazy situation.

Jan Heine
Rene Herse Cycles

This is fine and all but the tires I got were the endurance casing and the bead became looser after a couple hundred miles of riding. You’re also implying that people making tires that aren’t as loose fitting (literally everyone?) are making tires that can’t fit on “tight” rims. Blaming a rim produced in 2020 that people have used with all kinds of tires seems like a bit of a cop out to be and it makes me a little sad. Saying if you make the tire any smaller it won’t work isn’t believable to me I’m sorry. If that were true then big companies that make a lot of tires would be making them looser but they aren’t. Also saying there are no standards in existence is only half true imo.

At any rate I expect nothing from anyone and what I’m going to do is take off the many layers of thin dt Swiss rim tape and retape the rim with gorilla tape until it’s tight, then hope the tire doesn’t blow off the rim when my SO is bombing down a chunky hill as she likes to do.

Thanks I guess?

Last thing you say they are as fast or faster than any other tire in the industry, I don’t remember seeing Rene herse tires on a rolling resistance test and I’d be curious how they stack up to something like my thunder burts if any data exists. Care to link to any comparisons?

[mtechnica]

Originally Posted by RWL2222

Nicely done response! I would try RH tires without hesitation. How many of the bashers have built a business and advanced a new and innovative product?

I’m not “bashing”. I was on a 5 day bike packing trip and the tire failed because the bead is looser than any other tubeless tire even after multiple layers of rim tape. This is a fact and I was trying to find out if that’s normal for these tires which unfortunately it seems like it is.

?

[.RJ]

Originally Posted by pottshead

You don’t hear about it happening with Panaracer very often...

Dont Panaracer make the compass/RH tires?

[fiamme red]

Originally Posted by .RJ

Dont Panaracer make the compass/RH tires?

Yes.

https://www.renehersecycles.com/how-...om-panaracers/

[mtechnica]

Originally Posted by .RJ

Dont Panaracer make the compass/RH tires?

They manufacture the tires to the customers specifications/dimensions so they will not be dimensionally the same.

[dbnm]

Has any other tire company made a similar declaration to what Jan made?

[Jan Heine]

All I can say that for our recent Bicycle Quarterly tire tests, I got to mount 35 sets (70 tires) on various rims - many Rene Herse tires, but also WTB, Schwalbe, FMB and others that we tested as well. The same tires fit tight on Enve rims and really loose on WTB OEM rims. Going back to the Enves, the tire were tight again, so it wasn't that the tires stretch – the rims are different in their diameters.

At the ASTM meetings –*last year in Denver, now only virtual – all the engineers from the big bike companies meet to discuss upcoming standards. Rene Herse is one of the smallest companies there, but we participate because we care about this stuff. It's also an opportunity to talk to the rim guys – Enve, Zipp, Stan's and many others are there – and arrange for mutual testing of our products. Among these guys, there's a lot of talk about rim/tire fit. I'd say it's 60% of what people talk about in the sessions. (Another big issue in Europe especially is shimmy on ebikes...) Everybody is grappling with the issues: With tubes, you have a lot of leeway with respect to tire fit; tubeless requires much tighter tolerances. Most companies prefer not to talk about it in public, but we're riders ourselves, and we don't want anybody get injured...

There's a lot of speculation in this thread about specs – all I can say is that we have access to all the technology that our suppliers use, and we change things only to improve them. And since our supplier's own tires fit well on rims, we actually use the same spec as they do. Where our specs are different is mostly with respect to the casings, tread pattern and tread rubber. The fit isn't something we fiddle with. We meet regularly to discuss our findings –*our testing complements their own – and look at changes if they're needed. The rim/tire fit hasn't changed in a while now, because we all feel that we've got the best possible compromise.

Again, I can't pretend to know everything about every rim that's out there. We've tested quite a few, and found significant variability. That's why we say that if you need huge blasts of air from a compressor to seat the tire, the fit is too loose. (Using a compressor to make seating the tire easier is no problem, it's just that you shouldn't use the compressor to compensate for a loose fit.)

If you've found other tires that you really like, that's fine. We're not saying we make the only tires worth riding. We're just making the tires we want to ride ourselves, and we also make them for others who enjoy similar performance.

Jan Heine
Rene Herse Cycles

Originally Posted by mtechnica

This is fine and all but the tires I got were the endurance casing and the bead became looser after a couple hundred miles of riding. You’re also implying that people making tires that aren’t as loose fitting (literally everyone?) are making tires that can’t fit on “tight” rims.

[spoonrobot]

Originally Posted by mtechnica

Last thing you say they are as fast or faster than any other tire in the industry, I don’t remember seeing Rene herse tires on a rolling resistance test and I’d be curious how they stack up to something like my thunder burts if any data exists. Care to link to any comparisons?

Bicycle Rolling Resistance did a test of the Bon John Pass. It didn't place as well as many had hoped: https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/tour-reviews

There's been some other 3rd party testing, check the links, within the links, below. It goes about as well as the BRR testing. There's no free lunch, no matter how supple the tires are.

Bicycle Quarterly has stopped publishing tests overall and never pushed any tests of their knobbies, per Jan in a Google Group thread from last year - the explanation is awesome: https://groups.google.com/g/internet...m/jlT0N4eKBwAJ

The whole thread is worth a read, as is this one: https://groups.google.com/g/internet...m/wBx9FRCfAQAJ

I got kicked out of iBOB for being a knob in the second thread so keep that in mind

[Jan Heine]

Testing supple tires isn't easy - after all, the supple tire revolution started when we stopped testing on steel rollers. So if you go back to steel rollers, you'll find exactly what we used to believe: narrow tires roll faster and higher pressures roll faster.

TOUR magazine in Germany did a test with their ingenious pendulum device, and it showed the Rene Herse tires as one of the five fastest they've ever tested. You can see that test here:

https://www.renehersecycles.com/one-...-in-the-world/

That test didn't include a rider, so it neglected the part of the equation where a supple tire shines: Reducing the vibrations that slow rider and bike by absorbing energy through friction between body tissues.

We're very aware that it's not ideal if we test our own tires and tell you that they're faster.*With our recent tire tests, we published a detailed discussion of our methodology in the hopes that others will start testing tires in realistic settings –*on real (flat) roads, not (convex) rollers that dig into the tire, and with a rider on board to capture the suspension losses.

Sticking to steel drums isn't going to tell us much – except that we should go back to the 1990s when we all rode 20 mm tires pumped to 120 psi... because they tested fastest on the steel drum tests that we all believed back then.

I think we've gone beyond that by now. The usual retort at this point used to be: "If, as you say, 25 mm tires at 85 psi are faster, why do all the pros still ride 23s at 120 psi?" But it's already been quite a few years that the pros have switched to wider tires and lower pressures – because they can test with power meters themselves and don't believe the steel drum tests any longer.

Jan Heine
Rene Herse Cycles

[mtechnica]

Originally Posted by Jan Heine

All I can say that for our recent Bicycle Quarterly tire tests, I got to mount 35 sets (70 tires) on various rims - many Rene Herse tires, but also WTB, Schwalbe, FMB and others that we tested as well. The same tires fit tight on Enve rims and really loose on WTB OEM rims. Going back to the Enves, the tire were tight again, so it wasn't that the tires stretch – the rims are different in their diameters.

At the ASTM meetings –*last year in Denver, now only virtual – all the engineers from the big bike companies meet to discuss upcoming standards. Rene Herse is one of the smallest companies there, but we participate because we care about this stuff. It's also an opportunity to talk to the rim guys – Enve, Zipp, Stan's and many others are there – and arrange for mutual testing of our products. Among these guys, there's a lot of talk about rim/tire fit. I'd say it's 60% of what people talk about in the sessions. (Another big issue in Europe especially is shimmy on ebikes...) Everybody is grappling with the issues: With tubes, you have a lot of leeway with respect to tire fit; tubeless requires much tighter tolerances. Most companies prefer not to talk about it in public, but we're riders ourselves, and we don't want anybody get injured...

There's a lot of speculation in this thread about specs – all I can say is that we have access to all the technology that our suppliers use, and we change things only to improve them. And since our supplier's own tires fit well on rims, we actually use the same spec as they do. Where our specs are different is mostly with respect to the casings, tread pattern and tread rubber. The fit isn't something we fiddle with. We meet regularly to discuss our findings –*our testing complements their own – and look at changes if they're needed. The rim/tire fit hasn't changed in a while now, because we all feel that we've got the best possible compromise.

Again, I can't pretend to know everything about every rim that's out there. We've tested quite a few, and found significant variability. That's why we say that if you need huge blasts of air from a compressor to seat the tire, the fit is too loose. (Using a compressor to make seating the tire easier is no problem, it's just that you shouldn't use the compressor to compensate for a loose fit.)

If you've found other tires that you really like, that's fine. We're not saying we make the only tires worth riding. We're just making the tires we want to ride ourselves, and we also make them for others who enjoy similar performance.

Jan Heine
Rene Herse Cycles

Well thanks for the civil response and explanation. It sounds like you’re trying to do the right thing. I know you are right about rim variability. That said I can’t help but wonder if it would be better and safer to err on the side of a tight fit rather than cater to whoever has the largest rim (enve? I would think the vast majority of people don’t have enves) but it’s not my call.