absoluteBLACK Aims to Simplify Installation with New Polyimide Tubeless Rim Tape for Carbon Rims

Looks very very similar to Kapton tape, like the 30m rolls you get on ebay for around £6.

would be interesting to see if there was much of a difference.

Kapton is the brand name for “polyimide” tape – so yes they are more or less the same. I agree, it looks like the Giant tape has been this type of polyimide tape for years.

American classic used that stuff ten years ago

I’ve been using Kapton tape from Amazon on my wheels for years. It’s the same product at a fraction of the price.

The first version of Silca’s tubeless tape was Polyimide, but Silca stopt using it for a reason…

We’d like to clarify a few points.

Kapton® is simply a trademark for one manufacturer’s polyimide film.

The mixed experiences many riders have had with polyimide tape come from the fact that almost all tapes sold online are designed for the electronics industry—not bicycle rims. They typically use an ultra-thin polyimide film with a thin silicone adhesive. Silicone adhesive has relatively low tack and doesn’t bond or conform particularly well to carbon rims, which is why many riders have seen disappointing results.

Our innovation isn’t the polyimide film itself—it’s the custom adhesive system and tape construction we’ve developed specifically for tubeless rim applications. The result is much better adhesion, conformity to the rim bed, and a reliable airtight seal. This is a custom-manufactured product made exclusively for this application.

As a point of reference, Shimano also uses polyimide-based rim tape on its Dura-Ace and Ultegra wheelsets, showing that polyimide itself is an excellent material when engineered correctly.

We would not recommend using standard electronics polyimide tape for tubeless setups. It offers the wrong adhesive, the wrong adhesive thickness, the wrong film thickness for tubeless application, and is typically difficult to trim accurately from a wider roll.

The reason virtually all electronics polyimide tapes use silicone adhesive is that they’re designed as high-temperature electronic insulation, where the adhesive must withstand temperatures similar to the polyimide film itself. Silicone’s relatively low tack is actually a disadvantage compared with adhesives designed to bond to carbon and aluminum.

Standard polyimide electronics tape is inexpensive because it’s extremely thin. Increasing both the film thickness and adhesive thickness proportionally increases manufacturing cost (for eg, if thickness triples, cost triples.) which is why a purpose-built tubeless tape is not directly comparable to generic electronics tape.

I hope this clarifies things a bit more.