How we made the best tubeless tyre sealant in the world

Sealant might not be the most exciting topic, but we’ve been working super hard at Peaty’s on a totally new Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant recipe for the past three years. The result is an awesome puncture stopping, ride/race run saving Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant that we’ve flat out tested to be better than the rest.

Essential info

Sometimes wading through a ton of words is almost as bad as a puncture that won’t seal so if you’re in a hurry the essential info is below:

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant is a unique mix that took us over three years to perfect.

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant has been verified by independent testers and the world's best racers as the fastest, most effective, most versatile sealant available.

• We only claim Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant will seal a 6mm hole but it’s regularly healed 8mm gashes in testing and Peaty put an 7.5mm bolt through it for our test video.

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant uses an ammonia free latex with fully biodegradable cellulose fibers and specifically sized puncture plugging particles.

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant still has ‘glitter’ in it, because it doesn’t work as well without. It’s black not rainbow though so your tyre and workshop won’t look like the scene of a unicorn sex crime.

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant works with C02 inflators, -15º to 50º C - temperatures, 15 - 120psi pressures, every tyre and plug type we could find and it stays fresh and working fine for over 6 months.

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant is fully backwards compatible with the O.G. Peaty’s Tubeless Sealant.

• Peaty’s Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant comes in 120ml, 500ml and 1L sizes (and even 5L and 25L sizes if you run a workshop or race team) and we’ve kept the same top value prices as our previous sealant.

The whole painful Peaty’s sealant story

If you’re heading to the loo for five minutes or just want to know how hard we worked to make the best puncture fighting fluid around, the full, painful Holeshot BioFibre Tubeless Tyre Sealant story is below.

In typical Peaty’s fashion we went all out with a unique formula for our original Tubeless Sealant and it’s mostly done us proud. We know the colourful glitter elements didn’t make everyone smile when it got spilt though. We also had a few duff batches that didn’t work as well as they should have done thanks to some unscrupulous contract manufacturers early on!

That left us with two choices: We could have just slopped the same sealant as most other brands sell into a bottle, slapped a Peaty’s label on it and gone to the pub early, knowing we’d never hear any moaning about ‘unicorn jizz’ ever again.

However, because we always want to create the best products we can, we decided to dig deep and make the best sealant we could by trying every possible solution. And frankly there were many times over the past couple of years we’d wished we hadn’t. Because testing, tweaking, refining countless different recipes using a vast range of potential puncture plugging and carrying solution elements was beyond exhausting. We even called in one of the most infamously independent product testers in the industry to act as our very own tire stabbing Stig and benchmark our mixes against every other brand.

And as much as we love finding solutions to rider’s problems we started wishing we hadn’t started. We had eureka moments with single batches we couldn’t repeat consistently at larger volume. We went fully deep dive on horse hair eco versions only to find they just didn’t work as well as microplastic alternatives. We mixed up recipes that were only 1% different but were somehow 10% worse and for a while we seemed to be going backwards more than forwards. We hated sealant, we hated our Stig, his murderous screwdriver onslaught and the disappointing data on his shanking spreadsheet. The pub plan seemed more like a great idea than ever.

But after three years and bottle after bottle after bottle after bottle of code labelled samples heading out of the Peaty’s lab to the Stig and other painfully honest testers we finally started getting somewhere.

The bio fibres we’d added were a game changer in terms of the overall speed and hole size sealing performance but we still had a great overall balance of usability. That meant the new mixes sealed better on initial inflation than the lightest road sealants. They plugged small holes as fast as the shank was removed, bubbled big holes shut in seconds and would even finish runs and then re-inflate with a 8mm stab wound - we only say 6mm on the packaging though just to be totally sure.

It coated see through carcasses on lightweight race tyres and skin walls. It sealed gravel and road tyres at pressures up to 120psi and it kept the snow bike of our Paralympic Champ ambassador Steve Bate at a perfect low teen PSI from blizzards to beach races

The latex carrying fluid played nice with every tyre, sealing tape and tubeless plug we tried, didn’t smell of a festival urinal and it could be rinsed out easily with water. Bryn our sealant boffin even started hoping he could take his therapist off speed dial.

We expanded our testing to ensure it stayed the right consistency in tyres all round the world from -15º to 50º C in a huge variety of use environments from almost constant to once a month. That also gave us the long term checks against separation, ‘bogies’ and balling up that could ruin the sealing performance and/or blocks valves solid.

Because we’re not into poisoning the planet or making your tyres smell like a urinal it’s also a totally ammonia free water based latex. This carries a very specific mix of biodegradable cellulose bio fibres (no plastic or carbon fibres here) and different sized bio particles. And yes, it has still got ‘glitter’ platelets in there, not because we have some kind of disco fetish but because it’s just not as good without them in there. The glitter is black not rainbow though, so your workshop/frame/tyres don’t look like the scene of a unicorn sex crime after a spill or puncture spaff.

The Stig’s multiply ruptured and re plugged gimp tire was giving consistently outstanding results and our pro mechanic and rider testers were giving us a big thumbs up because their tyres weren’t going down. We even turned up to Fort William the other week to find a Peaty’s sealant buzz had got their before us. In fact our sample stash was snapped up by the mechanic of a gravity legend Aas soon Aas we Aarrived and it got him from flat to back on track immediately.

Considering how well it works even at low volumes we think it's decent value too and 120ml trail sachet, plus 500ml and 1L sizes with direct valve inject hoses mean plenty of options.

Finally we could go to the pub with the Peaty’s name on a sealant we were properly proud of and most importantly we know it’ll deliver when you use it. Even better, despite all the time spent on development and the fact it’s much more expensive to make, we’re keeping the price the same as our previous sealant so it’s a reet bargain.

Cheers

Steve and the Peaty’s Products crew.

We’ve not just been working on the best sealant either. To get yourself the perfect puncture fighting team check out Peaty’s Holeshot Tubeless Puncture Plugger tool, Peaty’s Holeshot Tubeless CO2 inflator kit, Peaty’s X Chris King Mk2 Tubeless valves and Peaty’s new Tubeless Rim Tape.