Tubular glue-up not working yet.

[11.4]

And yes to both Angry and the Spud. I should have made that point as well. If your glue is coming off the rim that easily, there's a problem. It's either with the gluing surface or the glue. I've seen bad rim cement plenty of times, but the old days of it separating on a whim and leaving you a thick creamy sludge and a clear supernatant are mostly gone. Nonetheless, the stuff does die from time to time.

As for the rim itself, you don't need deep scoring -- this isn't about locking into texture on the rim bed. You just need to get off whatever might be on there, something that even acetone won't take off. If the rim has remaining mold release compound (sometimes a Teflon variety) or someone has tried to clean it with something like diesel or a GoofOff kind of product that leaves all kinds of solvents and oils on the rim surface, you may not get it all off with acetone. Sanding with a very fine grit (400-600 grit) carbide paper is the best and last resort to removing that. When people have problems with a glue job and don't completely remove the prior glue, there's no way to clean the tire bed -- and they just perpetuate problems. You're almost there, so I'd get it absolutely clean, sanded, and scrubbed with acetone and then start over. Good points from everyone.

[redir]

Goof Off will not leave a residue but WD-40 is designed to do just that, leave behind a water resistant coating. WD after all stands for Water Displacement.

I can assure you Goof Off is an excellent product for cleaning glue off of rims. Like I said last year too, there really is no need to clean the glue off. Goof off is so good that sometimes I just use Goof Off on the rim to soften up the glue then just mount the tire, which of course has a fresh layer of glue, and off I go. The Goof Off reactivates the old glue.

[11.4]

The issue I have with GoofOff and several similar compounds is that they are low-grade fractional distillates from a refinery. They pick the fractions that are principally acetone (60+%) but they add fractions containing xylene which is great at softening resins and dried paint but fairly hard to remove, and they have fairly high amounts of contaminants from the fractionation. These are various oils that have separated with the acetone and related distillates and that GoofOff doesn't really even try to define -- they call it a trade secret and say that they have various other components. Those oils at times can be quite difficult to remove and may not come off with a wipe from pure acetone. That the rim surface looks or feels clean doesn't mean that it is. The percentages of each item in GoofOff differ quite a bit from lot to lot because the fractions naturally vary with ambient temperature, source, and so on. There are various industrial applications that have to use cleaners in their processes and warn strongly against using any of these not-fully-defined cleaners. I would never put xylene on any carbon surface on a bike; it does soften resin. Methanol is simply very poisonous on your skin, inhaled or swallowed. The principal activity of GoofOff is driven by its principal component, acetone, but the contaminants and the unknown nature of some of them makes just using acetone a safer approach.

As for not removing all the old glue, we have different points of view. I've personally glued literally thousands of tires in my life with every glue from track shellac to neoprene suit cement to Soyo to Mastik One. One can take short cuts much of the time but then on one occasion the glue job will fail. The point above was to ensure that there were no variables that could contribute to a failure the next time around.

[Meisen]

seems like good advice here. I'm wondering in addition if the rims had some mold release residue on them? sorry if that was mentioned, I just skimmed this. If mold release was present it would require more careful scrubbing with acetone to remove that layer. The light sandpaper scuffing would probably serve this purpose as well though not as thoroughly.

[redir]

Thanks for the clarification on that, it's good to know.