Sealants also add weight, but for the kind of everyday cycling application where you’d use them to prevent flats, you’re probably not going to mind an extra few grams. Weight

Please Note: any reference to 'Royal Mail 24 ™' and 'Royal Mail 48 ™' are Official Royal Mail Service names and should not be interpreted as '24 Hour Delivery' and '48 Hour Delivery'.Choosing the best inner tubes is a surprisingly cheap way to improve some aspect of your bike's performance, be it speed or reliability. If all that matters to you is going fast, the best inner tubes — and the choice of fast riders for many decades —are made from natural latex rubber, but read on: they have downsides.

If you’re not aiming for everyday riding puncture prevention, then a weight reduction is nice to have. A typical inexpensive inner tube — like the ones your bike probably came with — weighs 100-110g; Continental’s Supersonic tube weighs 55g (all weights for inner tubes with 60mm valves). He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history. A wrinkle to all of this is that thinner and lighter butyl inner tubes have become available in the last few years. Bierman tested a 100g butyl tube against an 80g latex tube, but you can get butyl tubes as light as 50g. Because they’re thinner, they have lower rolling resistance but won’t lose air like latex, but their increased fragility means they need more care in handling and puncture more easily. Fed up of flats? Inner tubes with built-in sealant can fix punctures for you as you ride, often before you even know they've happened. Latex inner tubes have been claimed to be more puncture-resistant, because the rubber is inherently stretchier. Whether that makes a difference on the road is debatable as a tube held in place by a tyre may not be able t stretch as much as a tube being pressed against a broken bottle in an advert. For everyday riding you probably don’t want fewer punctures to come at the expense of daily inflation anyway.Sealants are a better solution. Preparations such as Slime contain small rubber particles suspended a liquid that dries on exposure to air. It’s pretty effective at sealing holes up to about 3mm across. However, it’s hard to squeeze a sealant through a standard Presta valve so sealant makers offer tubes with the fluid already inside. If you want to roll your own, then you want tubes with removable valve cores.