I punctured on todays ride, and got a nice sealant shower, but it didn’t seal and so i had to plug the tyre to get it to hold air and get myself home.
how safe is that tyre to now ride? should it be replaced asap?
How old is the rest of the tire? Where is the puncture? Is the plug holding and doing the job a few days later? How much of a hassle are you willing to deal with on the side of the road if it fails?
I punctured a gravel tire and had to plug it on the first ride. It’s got another 1500 gravel miles on it and still rolling great.
I punctured a road tire and the plug worked, kinda. That tire was fairly new but the plug with 75ish psi would ooze a little sealant more often than I liked. I binned it for a new tire.
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Dynaplug for the road…this solved my problem. The little arrowheads on them keep the pressure from squirting the plug out.
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I Dynaplugged a nearly new rear road tire when a puncture wouldn’t stop seeping sealant. I got the full life out of the tire with no issues.
-Tim
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Yessir dynaplug is a lifesaver on the road. You should get the full life out of the tire unless it was a tear.
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I’ve used a Dynaplug on a road tire and left it in there for the rest of the year. No probs.
I’ve got a bacon strip plug in the front tire of my MTB as we speak. But i’ve also thrown away 2 MTB tires recently when they’ve had 2 plugs each - simply because they punctured so easily that i decided that i was angry with them for being crap.
Generally if it’s plugged well and not leaking then just leave it.
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What did you use to plug it? If it was a dynaplug it should be good for the life of the tyre. If it was a tyre worm it’ll probably get pulled out at some point. Touchwood, I have never needed to use my dynaplug but I have used a worm. It was a rear tyre and I got circa 30miles out of it at speed before it started to fail every few minutes. A perfectly safe failure but a failure nonetheless. The only other time I have used a worm is on a mates disc wheel and when he listened to my advice and stopped tyring to pump it up to 120psi, the worm fixed it znd it was good for a sub 20mins 10 mile TT.
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I think every time ive ever plugged a tire, ive said im gonna replace it and it becomes a job for tomorrow, only to realize it 6mo down the road when I have a reason to pull the tire off and notice it again. Point being, if its holding air and theres life left, Id run it
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It’s hit or miss.
I’ve had all sorts of plugs fail at a later date, bacon strips, dynaplugs, you name it.
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That depends on a lot of parameters. I would probably approach this from the question: “What would you do if the plug fails out in the boonies at roughly the half-way point?” Would you want to risk that?
The other one is age. If it has about 1/3 of tread left in it or it is a bit dry in places, I would just get a new one to be honest. Penny wise, pound foolish.
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thanks for all the views on this.
the slit in the tyre was quite nasty and across the crown, the bacon strip plug i had used (don’t have any dyna plugs) was good enough for the short ride home and i pumped the tyre up to 75psi and left it over night, it was flat the next day so i’ve bitten the bullet and ordered new tyres.
Couldn’t get a matching tyre so i’ve had to buy two (because of vanity).
Now have a few days of procrastinating over whether i should change the tyres or go out and ride my gravel bike instead
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You made the right choice, tires are a safety critical component. Especially if it is a nasty gash or long cut, you are better off getting a new tire. And yeah, vanity is a thing. Don’t worry about it 
Out of curiosity, what tires did you get?
Out of curiosity, what tires did you get?
i’ve gone from schwalbe pro 1’s in black to the same with tan wall (hoping they won’t look daft on a dark red bike), i’ve used pro 1’s across a few bikes for a couple of years now and like them, also found them easier to set-up tubeless than conti’s
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How do you think they compare to Contis?
A vulcanising tube patch will bond to the inside of most tubeless tires. The exact same kind you used to use to fix inner tubes once upon a time. Stick-on ones don’t work in my experience, but glue-on patches make a permanent fix.
They don’t address structural weakness though so if you’ve cut enough threads to cause a bulge or other change in shape to the tire then the patch alone won’t fix the issue. You can get patches with structural fabric in them for this purpose (the Rema Tip Top ones have green or blue edges rather than red or orange to indicate the difference). They’re effectively a patch and boot in one. I’ve never tried one on anything really major but they’ve worked well when I’ve used them and should in theory be able to handle quite a lot.
Whatever kind of patch you use it’s not really a small job. You need the area to be really clean and have to abrade the rubber a bit with sandpaper (again, just like old style tube patches). For me that means taking the tire off, cleaning out the sealant, letting it dry thoroughly, then starting the process. You also need to keep pressure on it for several hours for the bond to cure, so I usually end up mounting the tire on a spare wheel with a tube in it overnight.
Depending on your ratio of disposable income to free time and workshop space this may or may not be worth the effort. I’ll do it if I cut something like a nearly new GP5000, but on a gravel tire near the end of its life I just leave the plug in til it’s time for full replacement. And as others have said, dynaplug is the option I’d trust the most for extended use.
When I finally changed the tyres on my commuter a month ago, after a year of almost daily use (my commute is 26km each way on less than perfect tarmac with lots of debris), including through pretty foul winter, I was pretty impressed to realise that there were 4 dynaplugs in my rear tyre and 7 in my front tyre. Many of those had been in for many months and had been ridden for thousands of kms (the tyres had been used for a total of just under 8000km), without any problems. The tyres were in a terrible state by the end, but there were zero issues with any of the plugs
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+1 on vulcanizing patch from the inside. I’ll ride a mtb or gravel tire for a bit with a plug, but I do not trust a plug at road pressures (and road speeds/risks).
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I really like them, this has been my first puncture that I’ve known about in around 7500km, various tyres and across a couple of bikes, i feel like they grip well in the wet and they’re pretty quick.
I know theres data around bur I would suggest that you’d be hard pressed to feel a difference between the top road tyres of most manufacturers unless comparing head to head
i also have the pro 1 TT’s on my TT bike which have been great
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