Ultimate Tubeless Sealant Development
A New Age in Tubeless Sealant
We are launching our new edition of SILCA Ultimate Tubeless Sealant with Injectable Fiberfoam. As 2.5 years of research, development, and testing has gone into this particular project we are so excited to release what is a major upgrade and a first of its kind.
Sealant History
Three years ago we released the highest performing sealant on the market. Every independent test has shown it has the highest power available. Why create just another sealant when the whole point is to seal punctures before they can end your day.
There were plenty of attempts at creating a similar product in the past but we were able to take a look at the market and take the best parts of other products and combine them together. This gave us a slightly longer lasting latex blend for longevity, carbon fiber for sealing power, and a foaming agent to bring those fibers to the puncture. We saw absolutely incredible sealing power that all of our pros were extremely excited to run because they knew it gave them the best chance of getting to the line with air in their tires possible. That doesn't mean it didn't come without some drawbacks.
The Problem
After the extensive feedback from the pros being overwhelmingly positive, we heard three main pieces of feedback from our customers.
1. I want to be able to inject the sealant
2. I don't want to worry about my sealant every two months. It needs to last longer
3. The two step system is too complicated
We knew through our own testing that these were really difficult, if not impossible problems to solve if you aren't willing to compromise on the sealing power. Never unwilling to take on a daunting problem we set out for what ended up being the next two and a half years to solve these problems. We started the project with the two goals of
1. Zero Compromises on sealing performance
2. Meet the three customer demands listed above
If we couldn't do these two things, there was no need to create a new product because we felt like there were plenty of mediocre sealants on the market that will seal some punctures some of the time. If you are looking for a low to medium performance product that is set it and forget it, we don't need to add to that list of products. We are really only interested in the highest performance products at every level.
The Sealant Solution
1. Making Injectable Sealant
We had previously come to the conclusion that if you could inject the sealant, it couldn't seal a hole the size of the valve. We had seen this to be true with our previous edition as it would clog the valve every time we would try to inject it. It was a single customer interaction at our booth in Emporia for Unbound that challenged this thinking. They were really not a fan of pouring in the sealant but were a massive SILCA fan. They challenged us by saying "everybody knew that carbon wheels couldn't survive roubaix, everybody knew that 23mm were the fastest tire, and everybody knew that a light and stiff bike were the most important variables on a bike. Surely there is a way to get the sealant to be injectable and still seal big punctures, just nobody has figured it out yet."
This got us off to the races and have tried countless different ideas and none of them worked...until we looked at a new carbon supplier. We really looked at the lengths of the fibers as that seemed to be the issue with injecting the sealant. We were able to work with them to create an optimized carbon fiber length that were much smaller.
When we tried this, we saw it worked! It took a few tries to get the ideal lengths dialed in, but as long as you didn't inject it really quickly, the sealant was able to go through the valve! What ended up being the second hardest part of this project was solved and made us realize that this really would be possible.
2. Make the Sealant Last Longer
Making the sealant last longer wasn't an easy task, but we had a bunch of ideas to test. The most difficult part of testing sealant longevity is that it takes a really long time. If you want a sealant that can reliably last six months you need...at least six months. If that one doesn't work, you are back to square one to start again.
Our previous edition would last three months pretty reliably in ideal conditions. If you left your bike on the balcony, lived at elevation, had certain tires, used a compressor with rusty water in it or CO2 to inflate the tire, etc it could drive that down to a pretty short time period.
After tons of different latex blends to look at potential longevity solutions we settled on an industry first of a natural and synthetic latex blend. We saw some really promising early results but also some odd interactions so we went about testing all sorts of combinations of types of both as well as the blend. The ultimate formula we have seen last well over six months, over and over again with multiple riders, conditions, etc. Some we have seen last over a year.
3. The Two Step System Is Too Complicated
Our need for a two step system was due to the complication with trying to accomplish a longer lasting sealant and get around the injectability problem. If we could solve those two problems with one formula then we could eliminate the need for two products.
We already covered how we created a sealant that could do just that so the only real question is "Did we lose any sealing power?" That brings us to the testing process.
Sealant Testing
Like we said earlier, testing a product that needs to perform for 6+ months is extremely time consuming. Since longevity wasn't the only goal we could split this into a few parts and start with the two goals that are quicker to test.
1. Does it still seal?
2. Is it injectable?
Every one of the dozens of formulas we ended up trying after we got to a prototype phase had to pass the lab tests before they ever were included in the longevity portion. This really helped us not waste time finding out that test version 22 lasted 14 months but couldn't seal a puncture better than others, or had trouble with getting injected. Every single formula was injected to start the set up, then tested to seal repeatable 7mm punctures within a single tire rotation in the stand. There ended up being 8 formulas that passed this initial test meaning we could move onto the longevity testing.
Sealant Longevity Testing
Now that we had formulas that we knew passed the initial testing we set about to find as many test riders as we could to get it into the field. Our own Travis Verhoff was participating in Unbound Gravel in 2023 for the first time and with the confidence it would seal it would be the first event that it was tested in.
We went about testing with employees, athletes, close friends of the company to get as many as wheels set up for testing as possible. After a couple months we got feedback that a couple of the formulas had some clumping issues so we tossed those to the side and replaced with the formulas we were having more success with.
This started to narrow it down and we had one that would last over 6 months but elevation seemed to cause some issues. This was actually expected, but you never know for sure until it is tested. Ultimately all of our test riders ended up converging on a single formula that was meeting all of our goals.
With the convergence on this single formula we gave it another 6 months of testing, and put its through its paces at Unbound 200, Leadville 100, Big Sugar Gravel, among others and saw the same incredible sealing performance we had come to expect and got some of our test riders over the 1 year mark with liquid still plenty in the tires. It was at this point we knew we hit the mark and had to go full gas to get this produced at a scale to launch in time for the 2025 season.
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