Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

October 2025
Writing | September 2025

Lifetime warranty versus "lifetime" warranty

28/10/25 21:39 Filed in: Gear
Most carbon bike wheels now proclaim a lifetime warranty. Trek's carbon wheels are in this category too. Directly from their website I can see "Warrantied for Life" under wheel features, and then it goes on to say "All Bontrager carbon wheels are backed by a lifetime warranty for the original owner".
 
What they don't put in headlines is the fact that only manufacturing defects are included in the lifetime guarantee - it would be fine in my experience if that was only a year as most defects show up pretty quickly once you use the wheel. Not included is outside causes for breakage, you know, like hitting something and cracking the rim. The way most rims fail. That is limited to 2 years. Not a lifetime. Not even the lifetime of a mouse.
 
Recently took a broken Bontrager rim into the dealer and it was denied by Trek - it is 3 years old. They will replace the wheel for about 1/2 price. Which is nice-ish, but certainly doesn't go very far to covering for a very expensive wheel that cracked on an un-noticed rock out on the trail. It certainly wasn't spectacular.
 
Then look at Reserve wheels. The rims from Santa Cruz bicycles, given a distinct name so as to not link too closely to the brand. They have a video of Danny MacAskill jumping down stairs without a tyre in an attempt to break one - he was eventually successful but it took some doing. And apparently those shenanigans are covered by their lifetime warranty. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Reserve is excellent about replacing broken rims, regardless of cause, even in the middle of foreign countries when people are on bike holidays and something went wrong.
 
ENVE limits their concern to 5 years and then has a pro-rated taper (I couldn't find how long it lasts) so that the longer you own it, the less credit you get towards the replacement rim. I hope I never break my ENVE rim because they would be non-trivial to replace with something else or expensive to replace with another ENVE rim.
 
Read the fine print...

TruTune time...

25/10/25 16:12 Filed in: Gear
Both the enduro bikes at my house are running TruTune full-size inserts. And it is a good thing they are. Set up with a reasonable amount of sag and in our typical riding, we both sometimes see full travel on the O-ring. In the first couple of rides on my Zeb fork, I was leaving behind 25+ mm of travel while running the fork on the soft side.
They do what they claim - slow down the ramp in pressure as the fork compresses. The theory, for those who don't want to go seeking the website and reading all the info, is that the carbon inside the spacer adsorbs air as the pressure increases. Adsorbed air is not part of the gas in the air spring, so effectively it is reducing the amount of air in the spring space as it compresses - pressure increases more slowly than it would otherwise. And on rebound it releases that air just as quickly.
I find it pretty easy to tip into the travel, supportive in the mid-stroke and still willing to use full travel on a big hit. Just the way I like it. RockShox could have made the spring chamber larger, but they didn't, so this is the next best thing.
 
I was slightly concerned that the fork oil would seep into the device and clog up the carbon. Doesn't seem to have happened. You'd think they'd build it to avoid that.

Troubles for road tubeless

21/10/25 18:59 Filed in: Gear
You can just about guarantee that motorbike, automobile and mountain bike tyres are tubeless without checking. But road bike tubeless is affected by trade-offs that might swing any given rider either way.
Clincher rims, rims made specifically for high-pressure tyres with tubes, are able to "clinch" because of the hook on the rim. Both sidewalls of the rim end in a small inwards facing bump - the hook. The tyre bead grabs onto the hook with the tube pushing outwards on the tyre - a safe and robust system. When you get a flat, the tyre can roll off the rim and cause a crash.
MTB rims have become tubeless because it makes the rim more robust and at the low pressures people should be running their MTB tyres at (<30 psi) they don't try to escape from the rim well. No hook can also give the fat tyre a better shape - Stan's rims use tiny hooks (left over from skinny rim days perhaps?) to avoid interfering with tyre shape.
Road rims, even with wide (for road) tyres on them, have to contend with lots of air pressure compared to MTB. A typical MTB tyre runs mid-20s. A typical tubeless road tyre runs 3 or 4 x that much (depending on tyre, rim and rider weight).
I run 18/24 psi in my MTB tyres (with foam inserts) and 70/75 psi in my one tubeless road bike.
 
Not many sealants will seal at 75 psi. None will seal at 100 psi. All of them seal well at 20 psi. That's the difference and the problem.
 

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