Vintage Wheels Part Deux

When I left off with the new vintage wheels, I was ready to go ride them. I was excited at the prospect of riding tubulars on the road (which I've never done in 20+ years of riding on the road!)

I decided to go check them over and look over my gluing job. I was neat when I did the job, and so there really was not a lot of mess when done. Everything looked pretty good. I did the typical push on the sidewall test to check the strength of my gluing job and got a suprise..... The tire rolled right off.

Huge dissappointment! I looked over the job, and the tires were glued well in the 'valley' of the rim, but nothing out near the braking track. Desparate, I wicked more glue into the edges and put a 'come-a-long' strap around the tire/wheel combo and pressed the tire into the glue with all the force I could muster.

After leaving that setup for a week, I pulled off my impromptu clamp and gave her a try. After pumping up the tire to 100psi, it peeled right back up. Nothing was going to hold that tire in place.

I've since decided that Vittoria's design of pre-sealing the basetape with glue is a good and bad idea. Probably very good when the tires are fresh and the glue is pliable. However, over time, it appears that it begins to shrink a bit. The result is a sharp, pronounced Vee shape of the base tape.

I peeled the tires off and threw them in the trash.

That was a month or so ago.

This weekend, I went by my secret stash of tubulars and found a nice set of 23mm Continental Sprinters. They were/are in excellent shape and feel very pliable.

I opted this time to use Tufo tape. Its expensive, and according to the 'SlowTwitch' guys, it actually slows you down through 'hysterisis'. I don't know about this last claim, but I'm not exactly a fast dude, nor will I be racing crits or other races on this bike. I just train and have fun on it.

Frankly, as for installation, I'm totally sold on the Tufo tape. With as little time as I have these days, the quick installation was totally worth it! I'll ride it this week and will have to ring back later with impressions on how it performs in the short and long term.

Oh yeah... the weight weenie in me came out as I finished up the install - 36 spoke tubular wheels and an ancient Shimano 600 freewheel, and the bike weighs 19.98 pounds. Not bad for some vintage steel!