I know what you’re thinking, “why in the world would someone review a patch kit?” The fact of the matter is that, while there are more and more tubeless tires on the market every day, it seems that the idea of repairing a tubeless tire is still fairly foreign to most. I found myself happily riding tubeless tires until a catastrophic flat occurred (in my case landing directly on a jagged rock off of a jump), and with no way to properly restore the tires tubeless ability, it would be thrown away or gifted to someone riding tubes.
I got to the point that I was fed up with not having a solid way to repair my tubeless tires, so I set out to find a tubeless repair kit that actually worked. After using a few “plug” style kits without consistent success, I tried the Hutchinson Rep’air kit.
How did it work?
Find out after the break!
My first thought upon opening the Rep’air kit, was “super glue? This must be a joke.” Inside the box you will simply find 4 tubeless patches, and 1 tube of glue, no more, no less, although with it retailing at $15.99 the possibility of saving up to 4 tires you can’t expect much more. It looked like tube-type patches and a tube of Hutchinson branded super glue, not exactly what I was expecting. However, after doing some research it turns out that Hutchinson claims that it is a special type of super glue that remains flexible and won’t dry out the rubber. This makes sense, as I have tried to repair tires with super glue before and it basically made the rubber brittle and didn’t really work. So I forged ahead, and tried to fix two different tires, each with large gashes through the casing.
INSTALLATION:
Hutchinson gives you two courses of action when determining how to go about fixing your tire, the trail-side emergency tire-on method, and the more permanent tireoff method. The cool thing about the tire-on method, is that it can be done obviously without taking off your tire meaning that you don’t have to unseat the bead. This of course means that once the tire is fixed a hand pump will bring it up to pressure, because the bead is already seated. Pretty neat huh?
To use the tire-on method, simply clean out the cut as best as you can and then squeeze the tire so that it opens up the cut. Once the cut is open and exposed, apply a good amount of glue to the inside and outside of the cut, let go, and allow to dry. Then inflate your tire and you’re off. While I used this method once and had success, although I would still only use this as an emergency way to get home and then I would remove the tire and install a patch.
