If you get a puncture in a tubeless tyre you can be back on the road within 20 minutes. Find the puncture spot, ream it out, insert a mushroom plug, and reinflate the tyre. Magic. Last year I took my old F650GS twin on one of the Moroccan trips instead of the Tenere for exactly this reason, and sure enough I got a puncture. But it was easily sealed as shown below.



However if get a puncture in a tubed tyre it involves removing the wheel, taking the tyre off, swapping out the tube (I would never try to mend on the piste), refitting the tyre and putting the whole caboodle back together again. And if you have a Tenere you'll know that the rims are deep and taking tyres off and on is difficult. And if you don't have a centre stand...

To complicate matters I tend to travel with thick HD tubes with normal tubes as a spare, so once I reach civilisation I get the HD tube vulcanised (see photo below), and then go through the whole palava again of removing the wheel and tube to refit the HD tube.


(praying helps the vulcanisation process)

Typically if your bike has alloy wheels it has tubeless tyres, if it has spokes it has tubed tyres. But this isn't always the case. BMW's 1200GS Adventure and KTM's 1190 Adventure have spoked wheels that allow tubeless 19-in fronts and 17-in rears, and KTM's 1190 Adventure R and BMW's HP2 Enduro have spoked tubeless 21-in fronts, and the KTM has an 18-in rear. So the technology definitely exists.

KTM's 2014 690 Supermoto R has tubeless tyres with (rather natty metallic orange!) spoked rims, so why can't the 690 Enduro R have the same? Or am I missing something here?

Apart from the ease of puncture repairs there are other advantages to tubeless. Saving 600g of unsprung weight per wheel is supposed to be a really big deal (and more like 1000g if you are using HD tubes). Also you can run low pressures without the need for rim locks as the valve isn't connected to a tube that could otherwise move around and tear off. But I hardly ever run low pressures in Morocco on tubed tyres as the pistes are sand one minute and rocks the next, and if you are have tubes you run the risk of getting a 'snake bite' puncture where the tube is pinched between the rim and the rocks.

It seems the only alternatives are to have your own tubeless wheels built by someone like Alpina at a cost in excess of £1200, go for the Tubliss system at about £200, or fit mousses at around £200. Tubliss has a reputation for slow air leaks and I would worry that mousses tend to wear too quickly for an extended tour, and it's difficult to get replacements in remote places, so neither seem ideal.

I've tried slime (inside HD tubes) yet I still had a puncture that it couldn't seal, so I ended up in a real slimy mess changing the tube.

So what I can't understand (maybe I'm missing something?) is why more manufacturers don't fit tubeless rims as standard or at least offer them as an option. Can anyone enlighten me?

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)