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What makes a good sealant?
It is a rare event when everyone at ADVNTR Towers agrees on something. Finding common ground on what makes a good tyre sealant though, is easy.
Our wish list goes something like this.
A good tyre sealant should seal tyres quickly and easily on setup and when you get a puncture out on the trail.
This is our sort of lab testing
That’s it. Nice and easy to understand. Everything else is a ‘nice to have’ but not critical. “Lab tests” can answer some questions but, if you are miles from home, wet through and covered in mud, the fact that something did well in a car park or in a lab is academic. If sealant sprays out all over the countryside and your tyre goes down…it is no good.
Halo Fibre-Tech Tubeless Sealant
Halo launched their brand of tyre sealant a few months ago and sent us a couple of 250ml bottles to play with. It looks like gritty milk and is a little more fluid than some sealants out there.
The delivery system is simple. Cut the top off the nozzle and apply to the valve after you have extracted the core. The nozzle fits over the valve rather than inside, so be careful when you cut the top off. Squeeze the desired amount into the tyre and resume normal tubeless fitting procedures. It works fine but on more than one occasion resulted in goo dribbling down the valve, all over the tyre, wheel and floor. It is also quite difficult to check how much you have squirted into the tyre. Consequently, I often squirted rather more than the recommended amount into the tyre.
To counter this, Halo have produced an ‘injector’, or is it a syringe? At £9.99 a pop it may seem a little steep but if you just think of it like a tool for the workshop, then I reckon you can justify it.
The 250ml bottle retails at a reasonable £7.99 but if you change a lot of tyres or want workshop quantities, you can buy a 5 Litre bottle (with free injector) for £69.99.
Does it pass the ADVNTR test?
On the whole, yes it does. I am changing tyres all the time and can report that the Halo sealant generally works well.
Suffolk ought to be called the Tyre Killer County if for no other reason than it is littered with micro daggers. Little flint shards lurk everywhere, just waiting to slice open your tyres. For this reason, it is also a good place to test tyre sealant. Indeed, many is the ride where I have been sprayed with goo as tyre sealant doesn’t…seal that is!
So far, the Halo sealant has performed reasonably well. I have returned home to find plenty of those telltale white patches on the tyre indicating where holes are…or is that ‘were’? So, it gets me home, but invariably, the tyres will have deflated by the next day. Still, I made it back without resorting to a pump so that is a result, and I would far rather deploy the track pump in the shed, than curse in the wet and mud, struggling at the trail side.
I call this a qualified success. Would I buy it? Actually, I think I would. There are a couple of sealants I really rate and this makes a third. If your local bike shop stocks it, I recommend you give it a try. But make sure you buy the injector if you want it to last!
Halo Fibre-Tech Tubeless Sealant
£7.99 for 250ml
Pros
- Good price
- It works!
Cons
- Delivery system is a bit crude
Last modified: 15th April 2019
