Ongoing Review: Hope 20Five with Tubes

UPDATED 04/06/2017: Added Pictures of Rim Bed and Tape.

I’ve been using the Hope 20Five for around 200km now and I’ve now experienced my first puncture. This gave me the perfect chance to test out what they are like to work with at the roadside.

Simple answer: I got a lift home.

A simple glass shard through the tread is easy to fix, and replacing a tube is child’s play. However, put that together with a very tight tyre/rim combo and it becomes a lot more difficult. Add to the mix a bunched up rim strip and it’s more like impossible.

The problem I found with the Hope 20Five rims is the spoke holes are quite large and extend past the dip in the rim bed, therefore if the rim strip gets bunched up, or gets stuck under the bead of a particularly tight tyre and moves, it will expose those spoke holes allowing the tube to puncture.

I managed to go through 2 tubes trying to fix this at the roadside, in the end I called for a lift home.

Once at home, with access to all my tools I did manage to bodge a fix. I ran 2 revolutions of electrical tape around the rim to protect the spokes holes and then ran the rim strip on top of that. The electrical tape gave enough grip to stop the rim strip from moving about when seating the tyre and it’s been running fine since.

My advice for those wanting to run these with tubes is to do one of the following:

1. Run rim tape that will stick to the rim bed
2. Run tubeless tape from the get go
3. Run 1 or 2 revolutions of electrical tape around the rim bed to seal the spoke holes before installing your rim strip

I’ve now ordered some tubeless tape, and am just waiting on some tubeless tyres to come back in stock so I can set these wheels up tubeless.