Orange Seal Endurance Sealant

Orange Seal Endurance Tubeless Sealant goes in easy thanks to the handy packaging, keeps tyres sealed, and didn't dry out during the summertime test period. Plus it's made from biodegradable stuff. In tubeless system terms, that's the Holy Grail right there.

Unless you've been buried under a few hundredweight of 21mm latex tubes for the last few years you will have heard of road tubeless tyre systems. What used to be a technology prone to catastrophically messy failures and curse-inducing incompatibilities has matured into a reliable mainstream offering led by the likes of Trek offering complete rim and tyre packages.

Of course in the mountain bike world tubeless has been the way to go for a decade, but the much lower pressures and beefier rims involved made it a much easier game for our knobbly brethren to play. Now as road tyres and rims get fatter and pressures correspondingly lower for better performance, road tubeless is here to stay.

One major sticking point – pun intended – has been sealant. Tubeless systems rely on liquid sealant to maintain an airtight seal betwixt tyre bead and rim, and to plug any holes caused by thorns, glass, fish-hooks or anything else you might roll over.

The quality of the sealant, its longevity and how easy it is to apply are all areas for consideration. Traditionally sealants have been based on latex, which has a natural tendency to dry out and form horrific 'boogers' inside your tyre and on your rim.

A year ago I reviewed the Slime Pro kit and found that the sealant wasn't the best. It didn't dry out like latex did, but there was a tradeoff: because it wasn't latex your tyre needed a butyl liner in its construction, restricting choice. It was also a bit watery on the seal-a-hole side.

Then I tried the Wickens & Soderstrom No.8 but found it didn't handle higher pressures well.

Oranges and Lemons

So clearly there is historic inconsistency and a need to understand what you want from a tubeless sealant: latex-based or not, high-pressure or not, etc etc. I had heard good things regarding the Orange Seal product, but approached the test with a wary eye and a spare tube in the jersey pocket.

The Orange Seal comes in a nifty bottle pack including an applicator tube for Presta valves. This tube screws into the top of the bottle cap so there's no need to open the actual bottle. In the bottle is 237ml or 8oz of sealant, enough for four to eight 700c tyres at 1oz-2oz a pop. There's a black plastic dipstick to measure how much is left in your tyre without breaking the seal. Nifty, but you'll have to remember how high the waterline was when full to get a relative measure.

Once you've removed your valve core (pliers or a valve core tool needed) you push the tube onto the valve, upend the bottle and insert the amount of sealant needed. There's no measuring guide on the bottle which is a missed opportunity, so you'll have to eyeball it.

I was able to install it using the rather fabulous milKit system without clogging the syringe or tubes; a win for checking and topping up the Orange Seal without unseating the tyre.

Under Pressure

Whether your tyres inflate first go using a trackpump is entirely down to which rim/tyre combo you are using and has nothing to do with the sealant. I managed to seat one with a trackpump but needed my Ghetto Blaster for the other. Once up, they stayed up, no hissing or further faff sloshing stuff around.

Over the following two months the tyres stayed up and only needed a bit of topping up with air each week, maybe half what I'd do with butyl tubes. I did notice one valve core getting a little clogged, but this is common to all sealants and you need to have a plan for de-clogging your valves on a regular basis (as covered in the long-term maintenance section of this review)

After two months and for the writing of this review I opened the tyre to see what remained inside. I was very pleasantly surprised to find a considerable amount of liquid sealant present. The Orange Seal claim to 'last 2-3x longer' does seem to bear out.

On The Road Again

I can say with 100% certainty that having ridden on purpose through a good quantity of summertime Hampshire's most obnoxious detritus, I suffered exactly zero punctures. The ageing (2000 miles?) Schwalbe Ones used for the last year's tubeless product reviews kept on trucking, the various repairs made previously held up. Now I'm the first to assert that a singularity of anecdote does not data make, but I did try, dear reader, I did try.

A meta-analysis of the internet's collective wisdom regarding Orange Seal returns pretty much universally favourable results regarding puncture repair capability. Whilst I'm loathe to cite other bike review sites in my own reviews, in this case the absence of a puncture in two months of riding necessitates some context. I shall make a note of returning here in the depths of winter to update on the Orange Seal experience.

Should calamity strike, Orange Seal claim that the Endurance Sealant is good for holes up to 1/4in or 6mm. That's a hefty slash in anyone's money. I would recommend people running tubeless carry the £5 Genuine Innovations Tubeless Tire Repair Kit regardless of sealant used. It's a tiny 3g worth of insurance against all but the worst possible cut.

For the money (refills available for a tenner) the Orange Seal Endurance Sealant is an excellent choice for your tube-free hoops.

Verdict

Orange Seal Endurance Sealant is an excellent choice for your tubeless setup