The milKit Tubeless kit is a simple but brilliant system that will help you more easily run tubeless tyres with less mess and hassle. It’s not cheap but you’ll be glad you’ve spent the money. Highly recommended for anyone who’s looking to make running tubeless wheels easier.
Despite what you might read or watch online, making the switch to tubeless is not necessarily easy – especially the getting your wheels set up and sealed part. The milKit Tubeless kit is an incredibly useful part of the tubeless puzzle whether you’re an experienced/competent home mechanic or a duffer like myself.
Once you get your wheels and tyres running tubelessly (if that’s a word), they do pretty much live up to the hype. You can run lower pressures for a more comfortable ride, they roll really nicely and they do seem to suffer less from punctures. It’s the part between deciding you want to try tubeless through to them running reliably that for me at least is a black art and can be fraught with frustration (and swearing).
As there’s no industry standard for tubeless rims or tubeless tyre construction, not to mention the proliferation of wheel, rim and tyre options, there is for many of us, a lot of potential hassle in bringing these elements together on your bike.
The milKit Tubeless kit is a fantastic product to help make running tubeless that little bit easier and that little bit less messy. On face value, it looks quite expensive for what you get. For a retail price of £50 for the kit you get a well packaged cardboard tube that includes a pair of milKit tubeless valves, a fancy syringe (the applicator) for measuring out sealant and a valve core tool (plus instructions) and on that basis it seems like quite a lot of money for not very much stuff. However, in use, the milKit system works so well and makes such a tangible difference to the tubeless process that it’s highly likely you’ll feel it’s been money very well spent.
Let’s start with the valves. Yes, plenty of people can sell you tubeless valves but the brilliance of the milKit ones is that they hold air up to 22psi (1.5 bar) without the valve core. This is fantastic for two reasons. Firstly, for getting your tyres sealed onto your rims, you can pump air in and then not have to break the seal to put your sealant in. 20psi should hold the tyres safely on your rim and then you can simply inject the sealant in the exact quantity you need using the “fancy syringe”/applicator – no mess, no hassle, no bother. From there you can pop the valve cores back in and pump your tyres up to whatever pressure you want. Since getting your tyres on and seated on the rims is the key challenge of tubeless, this is very helpful indeed.
The second reason, the milKit valves are great is that when you want to check and top up your sealant levels (generally months later), it’s a very easy process to do so. You simply reduce the pressure in your tyres to less than 22 psi (I’d recommend around 15psi), then remove the valve cores. Then you can use the milKit Applicator syringe to extract exactly how much sealant you have in your tyres. Then you can easily add to that and ensure you have the optimal level and inject it back into the wheel through the Milkit valve (that’s still happily holding some pressure in your tyres to minimise leakage/loss of seal. Once you’re happy that you have the correct volume of sealant you simply pull out the syringe, screw the valve cores in and pump up the tyres again. In fairness you need to be careful that you don’t get a squirt of tubeless sealant when you pull out the applicator (turning the wheels so the valve is at the top rather than the bottom is my tip). But other than that the Milkit Valves make this an almost painless process.
The Milkit Tubeless system is a very well thought through and well executed product that’s an easy recommend to anyone running tubeless. Also if you have more than one set of tubeless wheels, all you need to do is buy another set of Milkit Valves to use with the applicator to bring the same benefits to more wheels or bikes in your stable. This is the best tubeless product I’ve used and I’m very pleased to have it in my toolbox.
For more information visit Milkit at https://milkit.bike/en
You can buy Milkit Kits and Valves from Wiggle here: http://tidd.ly/a42b3829
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