Orro Road Tubeless Kit

Bike brand Orro has added a new Road Tubeless Kit to its list of accessories and it all works well. The sealant does a good job of closing up holes and cuts in your tyres and the valves and tape are up to the job. It's competitively priced against the best in the business too.

• Pros: Sealant seals punctures at high pressure; rim tape is robust
• Cons: Nothing really

With more and more tubeless-compatible tyres and wheels coming into the marketplace, ditching your inner tube isn't as costly a swap as it was a year or so ago. Many bikes are even specified with tubeless-ready wheels as standard, so conversion kits like this one from Orro make for a simple solution.

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On test we have the Road Pack A, which includes two bottles of sealant (60ml each), two 50mm long tubeless valves, and a 22mm x 10m roll of rim tape. There is a pack containing 70mm valves if you are running deep-section wheels, and there is also a pack for gravel bikes and another for mountain bikes.

The tape is 22mm wide, which is suitable for internal rim widths of 20-21mm. That covers most road rims, and being 10 metres in length there is enough to wrap at least four wheels.

There is plenty of adhesive on the back, so once it is stuck to your rims it shouldn't move, and it's a decent balance of thickness versus flexibility so that it follows the profile of your rim bed without creasing up.

The valves look to be pretty generic, and the two different rim bed shapes I tried them on didn't cause any issues when it came to sealing around the rubber grommet. On the pack it says there should be a valve key to remove the valve core so you can add the sealant, but there wasn't one in ours; luckily, I have plenty kicking around.

The sealant itself isn't one I've seen before. It's grey in colour, with the fibres for sealing bigger cuts and gashes being black.

As luck would have it, the tyres I was using shrugged off punctures through the test period, so I had to take things into my own hands with a drawing pin.

I'd inflated the 25mm tyre to 100psi, and jabbing it with the pin saw the sealant close the hole pretty quickly, with the tyre only losing about 30psi in total. What's more, the sealant held that pressure for the next 24 hours – some sealants struggle to hold anything over 50-60psi.

> What they don’t tell you about tubeless

Using a scalpel to create a slit around 5mm long saw the sealant do its job again. The tyre lost a little more pressure, but once pumped up it held 70psi again. Go up to 85psi, though, and it would blow out.

If you run high pressures, you could easily patch the inside of the tyre once you got home.

The sealant has been in the tyres for around a month, so it's early days to be able to tell how long it is going to last. I'll keep an eye on it. At the start of the test period the temperatures were in the mid-20s, while at the time of writing we are looking at the low-teens.

We have tested a fair few tubeless conversion kits, but different combinations of parts makes judging the overall value of the Orro a little tricky.

One that is very similar is the Stans NoTubes Road Bike Tubeless Kit, which also offers two tubeless valves, a roll of rim tape and two bottles of sealant for £32, a fiver more than the Orro.

Overall the Orro kit performs well and delivers everything you need to go tubeless for decent money.

Verdict

Good quality components that are easy to use and give peace of mind