I’m tired of flat tires on my bicycle! What’s the consensus about air-free bicycle tires? Are they any good, or are they awkward replacements? It seems that few people have actually tried them, but many are quick to level attacks against them. Seeing that tire technology seems to have changed little in the last 100 years, I would like to know whether I should give them a shot. Does anyone have any experience with them? Also, does anyone have experience with the tires on this website:
Thanks!
Here is one opinion from something of an expert - http://sheldonbrown.com/tires.html#airless
Basically an air filled tire uses the entire volume of the tire as a shock absorber while the solid tire uses only the material in the area of the impact.
I didn’t see any weights listed at the site you linked but solid tires are typically much heavier. If weight is not an issue You can get heavy weight tubes (usually labled ‘thorn resistant’), liners to go between the tube and tire, and/or tougher tires. I have even seen tubes that come prefilled with ‘slime’, a product similer to ‘fix a flat’ that is supposed to seal up small leaks.
You didn’t say what type of riding or type of flats you get. I do a fair amount of biking and very seldom get flats. Perhaps there is another problem that is causing you to get more flats than you should.
Never tried them Cagey Drifter, so let me be the first to attack them 
Seriously, I’d be skeptical of their performance mainly because I disagree with your statement on the progress of tire technology in the past 100 years. I ride plenty using tubeless tires with a latex sealant inside, relatively modern innovations. I get about one or two punctures a year, and thats going out a lot and hitting rocky trails pretty hard. Mountain bike tire technology is a big deal, if you already own a good bike then the single most influential change you can make to you ride is the tires. The tire companies appreciate this and offer a huge range of products. Airless tires are not generally amongst them, which leads me to regard it as a bit of a gimmick.
Innovation on the bicycle is a tough proposition, its hard to improve on a machine that has undergone only incremental changes over the past one hundred years, there has to be a clear demonstration of performance enhancement. Most so-called innovations can’t offer this, and are gimmicks. It seems like it would be extremely difficult to find a tire filling that managed to be rigid enough to support you, whilst being deformable enough to provide a ride that was not incredibly harsh. The relative plasticity of the filling would also be crucial to the bike’s handling.
I guess riding on the street is a different proposition to mountain biking tire-wise, I’m sure someone will be along to give you an opinion on the merits of the “airless tire” from this perspective, maybe they can advise you on how to avoid so many punctures.
Let me put in my 2c worth in this way:
I went for a ride last weekend down a mountain on my road bike on a very rough paved road. This involved 80kg of bike and rider (that’s about 175 pounds) at up to about 40 mph for about 15 miles hitting ruts hard enough to rattle my teeth, supported by rims that consist of nothing more than hoops of lightweight aluminium sheetmetal, without failure or any sign of it.
This is possible due to the awesomely perfect piece of engineering that is the pneumatic tyre, which spreads massive hits from road shock so evenly that the rims can cope with abuse that frankly still amazes me after decades of riding.
I’d need serious convincing from someone other than a salesperson that any non-pneumatic system could cope as well.
We bought 2 of The Marathon Wheelbarrow Tire for Air free last year for our Craftsman Lawn Cart. They custom cut the axle sleeves for us and they are great. The Original Pneumatic tire always blew out and went flat do to tough use.
These have been perfect and only 50% more than the crappy Pneumatics.
I would highly recommend the Company.
There are two issues. One is performance. Simple physics. The heavier the tire, the slower you’ll go and/or the more effort it will take to accelerate. Also, be aware that mass on the wheels counts twice, once as weight to move (when accelerating and climbing hills) AND weight to “spin up” (i.e., there’s an angular momentum penalty). That said, I don’t care about performance and would use airless tires if I could get them on the rims. Tried once (a different brand, indeed a different approach). Could not do it. And could not find a bike shop that would attempt it. But, as I say, it wasn’t this tire, so maybe it’ll work.
I’ve got 'em on one of my bikes. They’re heavy and ride like crap (bumps are VERY rough). Won’t use them again. jmo
I had a chance to test one out. Suffice it to say, I will never use one again. They are not as rough as you might think, but it felt like there was a heavy weight on the back of my bicycle. On level terrain I felt like I was going uphill. I removed them after one day. Sheldon Brown is right, the pnuematic tire is a product of genius.
The owner of that sight was very big one promoting his wares in the USENET rec.bicycles hierarchy, but after several speeches about how great his new tires were he was confronted by Shledon Brown. He made some retorts but refused to accept a challenge to have Brown test his tires.
These might be fine on a wheelbarrow, but not for a bike.
A couple years ago I installed these “airless” tires on my bike. I took them off after one week and disposed of them. $100 down the drain. IMO they were downright dangerous.
It wasn’t the weight; I barely noticed that. It was because they had no lateral traction.
A standard bicycle tire is made from a relatively soft rubber compound that exhibits a lot of friction in the lateral (“sideways”) direction. This is a good thing… the tire will “grip” the pavement as the bicycle is leaning to the side.
The airless tires are made from a smooth compound that feels more like plastic than rubber. When you go around a turn, the tire will not grip the pavement; it will slide!! It even makes a squeaky noise as it slides laterally along the pavement! Suffice to say, I was nervous about leaning too much into corners when I had these tires on my bike. So off they came…
It’s not just the tires/tyres, brilliant though they are. It is also the wheels. Most bicycle wheels are built up from lightweight spokes that attach to the hub tangentially under tension while, say, a wooden wagon wheel’s spokes attach radially. When a wagon wheel hits a bump the force is transferred straight up one or two heavy, stiff spokes directly into the axle, giving the classic wagon’s rough ride. When a bicycle hits a bump the force hits the hub off-center, twisting the wheel and spreading the force among the many spring-like spokes.
Anyway, what good are mountain bike tires that are always “inflated” the same amount? You can’t add air for hard surfaces and let air out for soft surfaces. And what does a fat guy like me do, since I have to overinflate ten or fifteen PSI to accomodate my weight? Sounds like a bad idea, though not a new one. People have been coming up with “improvements” for the bike for 175 years–there were years in the late 19th century when bicycles patents outnumbered all others–but only a paltry few have made a real, positive difference and the lion’s share of them were, like Myler Keogh said, incremental.
In the factory where I worked, all the bikes (trikes, actually) had solid tires. Hard and heavy but they never went flat.
The Industrial Garage mecanics briefly tried foam-filled tires. They were lumpy, and the ride was like a grocery-store horsey ride, with the lumps on all three wheels coming at different times.