And to love you.
As I mention often on this site, I have a fleet of bicycles. And one of the key maintenance tasks when you have more than one or two bikes is to make sure that each machine is ready to ride. And the most basic part of that is that your tyres are inflated to the right pressure.
For most of my bike-riding life, this has been pretty simple. A butyl inner tube sits inside a tyre, whether its a mountain bike tyre or a road tyre or a touring bike tyre. You pump up the tube/tyre and its good for a couple of weeks. And if you get a flat, replacing the tube is a piece of cake once you have mastered the John Pittendreigh method of tyre removal. The only caveat that you must find the cause of the flat for it to be fixed properly.
But for the last 10-15 years, mountain bikes have been all about tubeless. I currently have two mountain bikes, sort of, and they both have always been set up tubeless. I don’t own a compressor, so the challenge for mtb tubeless is seating the tyre on the rim. In recent times I’ve been using a CO2 cartridge with its burst of gas to provide the impetus required for a mtb tyre to push out onto the shoulder of the rim bed.
I also have a road bike and a gravel bike, of course. Road tubeless has been a thing for a little while, but I remain on the fence about that development. The much smaller volume of air in a road tyre gives a much shorter window for the sealant to fill any puncture and seal it in time.
So the road bike currently runs TPU inner tubes, inside 30mm wide road tyres. That’s working well. TPU tubes are much lighter than butyl tubes, so for the first few rides on the road machine after I swapped to TPU, the bike felt livelier than ever. Of course, now I am habituated to the new feel of the bike and its just the new normal.
So a few weeks ago I switched my gravel bike to tubeless. So far its working fine, and really I think that after roughly 45 years of bike ownership I think I’m in a pretty good place as regards my relationship with the miracle of pneumatism.
And the hidden key to making all of these person/bike/tyre interactions as seamless and simple as possible is the Clik valve.
The Clik valve has only been around a couple of years, and it has already long surpassed the Presta valve as my inflation method of choice.
I’m not here to carry on about the deficiencies of the Presta valve. Lots of people see no reason to discard the Presta, and I was the same until the Clik valve came along.
Clik valves just make everything to do with tyres just a little bit easier. And as I once again note, I am trying to keep six bikes in constant working order.
Three tubed bikes: the Frezoni road bike, my commuting city e-bike and Brommie the folding bike.
Three tubeless bikes: the rigid 29er bikepacking machine, the Kona Precept mtb, and my Merida Silex 700 gravel bike.
And on every bike a set of Clik valves, replacing the Presta valves of yore, except on the Brompton. There a Clik valves adapter improves a Schrader (car-type) valve.
Which bits of kit do I rate as the most helpful in making the transition away from Presta valves into the 21st century?
- The replacement Clik valve pump head on my Joe Blow track pump. Just push the pump head onto the valve. It Cliks. You pump. You pull it off when done. The efforts are small, simple, non-violent. It’s a joy to add some air to your tyres. And it’s so quick.
- 3D printed screw-on funnel for adding sealant to a tubeless tyre. Unscrew the Clik valve (its easy, they are only finger tight anyway). Screw on the Straz funnel. Pour in the sealant. Unscrew funnel, re-fit the Clik valve.
- A Clik CO2 inflator. I finally think that I have close to a 90% success rate in seating tubeless tyres. Most recently fitting Pirella Cinturatos to the Silex … no dramas whatsoever. I am considering pushing my luck to the nth degree by re-fitting the Rene Herse tyres as tubeless.
- The Clik adapter for Schrader tubes is brilliant. You don’t even replace the valve core. You just screw the adapter onto the Schrader valve, job done.
- TPU tubes with removable (Presta) cores. Removable cores have been standard on butyl tubes since forever. But when TPU tubes came out a couple of years ago, the early models all had plastic stems with the core glued into them. Fortunately you can now buy pretty fancy TPU tubes from Schwalbe, Rene Herse, Cadence and others that have steel valve cores. Or less fancy ones from Amazon (Cyclami is the brand that’s working for me) that seem fine and also have removable cores.
(Side note: I’ve tried plenty of TPU tubes that did not last well, and had disappointing records of retaining the miracle of pneumatism in my tyres. Brands I now steer clear of: Guee, RideNow. Brands that were good at keeping the air inside, but still don’t make removable core tubes: Pirelli, Tubolito.)
In summary, Clik valves are so great that I have given sets to several of my cycling friends. I want these things to be available for the rest of my cycling life, so I really hope they catch on and the company is profitable.
Recommendation: BUY.