2018 Heritage wheels
Road Warrior
Joined: Dec 2009
Posts: 1,328
Likes: 154
From: Lake City, Florida
Triumph and BWM have spoked wheels that are tubeless. Harley cheaps out and keeps putting out the same wheels they have for a hundred and fifteen years. My 1948 bike had the same rims. They just painted em black this year, Oh, and raised the price of their new bikes. Why improve em, or worry about their customer stuck on the side of the road with a flat because of a antiquated wheel on your new bikes.
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Cruiser
Joined: Mar 2017
Posts: 152
Likes: 41
From: Surrey, UK.
Triumph and BWM have spoked wheels that are tubeless. Harley cheaps out and keeps putting out the same wheels they have for a hundred and fifteen years. My 1948 bike had the same rims. They just painted em black this year, Oh, and raised the price of their new bikes. Why improve em, or worry about their customer stuck on the side of the road with a flat because of a antiquated wheel on your new bikes.
H-D aren't being cheap here. It is impossible to make a traditional spoked wheel tubeless. The Triumph, BMW and also Honda that have tubeless spoked rims do so by having the spokes attach to the rim OUTSIDE the tyre bead, i.e. on the very edge of the rim and NO manufacturer does that for anything other than adventure style bikes.
Considering the furore that these new Softails have created over even minor and inconsequential changes, there would have been a mass suicide if any new H-Ds had spokes that attached to the very edge of the rim as would be required to make them tubeless. Oh the horror of that thought (spoke/rim attachment, not the mass suicide
)BTW, I am well aware of kits that can apparently convert a tubed type spoke rim to being tubeless, but they require that the spoke holes in the rim be sealed and no manufacturer has ever seen fit to rely on something so potentially unreliable. Not only that, but it completely ignores the fact that a tubeless rim should have an entirely different bead profile to seal the tyre edge - something tubed type rims do not have as there's no need. Overall, these kits are best avoided. Just use either tubeless cast/forged wheels or spokes and tubes.
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Road Warrior
Joined: Jul 2014
Posts: 1,584
Likes: 520
From: VA
One thing I have always done with spoke wheels is add " ride on " sealant. It gives some measure of protection against a flat. In one instance it saved me. I was looking at the bike in the garage and noticed some of the "ride on" had seeped out of the tire. It did prevent a flat on the road due to a small screw. Worth considering with spoke wheels
