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Jim’s Tech Talk
By Jim Langley
For anyone who doesn’t know what it means to “seat” a tire, let’s start with an explanation. To “seat” or “seating” a tire is one of the final steps taken when installing most tires on bicycles and motor vehicles, too.
Seating is important because it ensures that the inflated tire is fully and properly installed. If tires are not properly seated they can have low and/or high spots, twists in the tread and with the worst seating mistakes (high spots), they can blow off the rim.
To tell if a tire is seated properly (even old tires might not be fully seated), you look at the seat line that’s molded into every tire (photo). When a tire is properly seated, that line sits right on top of the rim, equidistant from the rim for 360 degrees around the wheel and on both sides.
The most common seating issue is having the seat line get stuck below the top of the rim (shown in the photo), what’s called a low spot. This can occur at only one spot or in several different spots.
When this happens, if you ride on the wheel, you’ll probably feel the low spot(s) in the tire each time you roll over it. And, because the tire is too low in one spot, it’s possible to damage the rim if you hit something at that spot.
To help, here are seven tricks for seating tires that refuse to. We’re talking about low spots, not high spots (see Tip). And for both standard tubed tires and tubeless.
Tip: High spot seating issues usually only occur with tubed tires and result from getting the tube stuck beneath the tire’s edge. To greatly reduce the chance of this happening, be sure to inflate the tube just enough to let it take shape before installing it in the tire. It’s easy to inflate Presta valve tubes up to the right amount for this by blowing into them like you do with balloons. Just remember, you need to make sure the valve is open first..
Roll the tire out with your hands
CAUTION: Do not put massive lateral force on the wheel when doing this “move” – or you could warp your wheel. Only put force on the tire.
This is the quickest and safest way to seat a tire and it works most of the time once you’re good at it. But, you have to do it a few times to learn how to do it and if you’ve never done it before, to even believe you can do it. Because it can take a few seconds of work before the bead slowly pops out or it might come right out, too.
You do it by holding the wheel between your legs and gripping the tire right at the low section. You want to use your hands however works for you to put maximum pulling force on the tire to try to roll the stuck seat line up and out from under the rim. I use the heels of my hands and rock them in an up-and-over action.
Air pressure
This is the way car guys and gals seat tires and a lot of bike mechanics do it, too. It’s kind of fun because as the tire seats it makes loud snapping or popping noises. But, there’s always a risk of blowing tires off the rim, which can be dangerous and expensive. I wrote about such an incident a while back: https://www.roadbikerider.com/overinflation-explosion-a-cautionary-tale-about-very-wide-tires/.
So, if you want to use this approach, use only your hand pump (air compressors put too much air in too fast) and very gradually increase the pressure. Give the tire a minute or so to see if it seats before adding more air. And, don’t ever inflate a tire way past the maximum pressure (it should be written on the tire sidewall).
Soap
Speaking of motorheads, they typically have a big tub of tire soap next to their tire mounting machines so that they can slather the slippery stuff on before inflating the new rubber. While there are tire soaps made for bikes, like BullSnot https://amzn.to/2nSud9T , common dishsoap works just fine.
To apply it, find the low spot(s) on the tire and keep track of it – because you’re going to deflate the tire next. You could mark the spot(s) with chalk if needed.
Deflate the tire. Then put a little soap on a brush and push the tire out of the way at the low spots enough so that you can get the soap between the tire and rim. Or you could drip it on the tire if you don’t mind risking making a mess and having a lot of clean-up.
When you pump up the tire, the low spots should pop out. If not, clean and dry the tire so that you can grip it and try to pull any remaining low spots by hand. The soap should still be between the tire and rim and with luck, the low spots will come out. If not, repeat the process one more time.
Use the ground
CAUTION: Do not put massive lateral force on the wheel when doing this “move” – or you could warp your wheel. Only put force on the tire.
If you’re on a ride and you have a low spot after fixing a flat (common problem with tubeless tires), hold the wheel in both hands so that the low spot is facing the ground and at 6 o’clock with 12 o’clock at your stomach.
Holding the wheel like this you can tap the tire’s low spot on the ground to put a pulling force (more like a jolt or blow) on the tire. This will sometimes get the tire seat line to come out from under and seat the tire. Just go easy.
Riding and waiting
Sometimes it just takes more time than you expect for the low spot to rise up to make its way to where it belongs. If a tire won’t seat, if you give it a chance, it might be seated the next time you check it. This can happen out on a ride. You just have to be willing to put up with a “funny” feeling of a low tire spot for awhile and baby the wheel and not risk hitting anything.
Tire seating pliers
The photo shows my Park Tool Tire Seating Pliers, which I have made great use of for decades: https://amzn.to/2mpy5Pp . The only thing is that you need to be careful to grip only the tire with this type of tire pliers. But they work well for many seating issues.
Vise
People are always surprised when I use this seating trick so I saved it for last. Don’t use it if you have any concerns.
The trick is to use a vise to grip the tire (tire only!) low spot and rock the wheel to pull the low spot out. Woodworking vises like mine have soft wood jaws that won’t harm tires. You can also use a metalworking vise by putting blocks of wood in place of the jaws.
You tighten the vise just enough to hold onto the tire (never allow the rim to get between the jaws!) and you then gently rock the wheel so that the vice can tug on the tire and get the low spots to pop out.
There you have it. I hope these tricks cure all your tire seating issues.
Jim Langley is RBR’s Technical Editor. He has been a pro mechanic and cycling writer for more than 40 years. He’s the author of Your Home Bicycle Workshop in the RBR eBookstore. Check out his “cycling aficionado” website at http://www.jimlangley.net, his Q&A blog and updates at Twitter. Jim’s cycling streak ended in February 2022 with a total of 10,269 consecutive daily rides (28 years, 1 month and 11 days of never missing a ride). Click to read Jim’s full bio.
There are many myths and conjectures around the composition of laundry soap. What is soap actually made according to GOST?
Until now, there are ideas that laundry soap is supposedly made from captured stray dogs. These horror stories had no basis even in the most scarce Soviet times. In the USSR, for the production of soap, animal fats were used, which were actually obtained from animal fat - bovine, horse, pork. These fats were washed with alkalis, resulting in a semi-finished product with varying degrees of animal fats.
Laundry soap is now a type of soap with a fatty acid content of no more than 72% and a large amount of alkalis, about 0.15–0.20%, as a result of which it has a very high pH - pH 11–12. According to GOST 30266-95, laundry soap is divided into three categories depending on the content of fatty acids:
Category I - must have at least 70.5% fatty acids;
II category - 69.0%;
III - 64.0%.
For the production of such soap, GOST allows the use of different types of acids.
These can be technical fat acids (solid fat obtained in industry by hydrogenation of liquid fats), edible fat, sunflower oil acids, synthetic fatty acids, coconut oil and some other types of fats.
Fat raw materials are heated in special equipment (boilers), caustic alkali (for example, soda) is added to this mass, which is often used in various areas of the chemical industry. The mixture is boiled at high temperature for several days. The resulting product is called adhesive soap. It is cooled at a certain temperature, cut into pieces, and we get our usual household bar soap. But with this method of manufacture, the percentage of acid content will be small.
More concentrated soap is obtained if it is produced by a different, indirect method. Glutinous soap is salted out (that is, salt is added) to remove impurities and increase the detergent content. To do this, add table salt (sodium chloride) or caustic soda to the soap glue. Dissolving in water, these substances reduce the solubility of soap. It separates and floats, forming a layer of more concentrated, so-called sound soap. With repeated salting out, a cleaner and lighter polished soap is already obtained. Peeled soap contains 70-85% fatty acids and has a more uniform texture. Such soap is crushed, ground on rollers, dried and pressed into pieces.
Auxiliary inorganic components can be used in the production of soap:
technical soda,
edible table salt,
soda ash,
titanium dioxide,
hydrogen peroxide,
zinc white.
GOST also allows the use of fragrances and additives to improve the consumer properties of soap, if these additives have been approved by the State Committee for Sanitary and Epidemiological Supervision. Salt or soda is needed to reduce the solubility of the soap and make it thicker.
The color of the soap depends on the percentage of fatty acids: at 72% the soap is lighter, at 65% it is darker. The higher this figure, the better the washing power of the product: a soap with a fatty acid content of 72% will wash dirt better. But the manufacturing process of laundry soap is such that the percentage of acids can vary from batch to batch. For example, one piece may have 71%, and another 75%. In order for the buyer to be guaranteed to receive the required amount of acids, GOST introduced a quantitative number - an indicator that guarantees the mandatory presence of the required set of acids per 100 g of product. If there are more acids, the mass of the piece decreases, and if it is less, the mass increases, but the user always receives the required number of pure fatty acids. So, in 72% soap, this amount will be 144 g per 200 g of a bar of soap.
A product with a high amount of fatty acids may have a specific odor.
For reference
According to GOST, soap should not have the smell of decomposition products of organic substances, rancid fats, fish and other unpleasant odors. In appearance, deformations, cracks, solid foreign inclusions are not allowed.
72% soap is more suitable for laundry, while soap with a lower fatty acid content is more suitable for cleaning, as it lathers better. Choose soaps that are free of fragrances, dyes, and other additives. Then it will be an environmentally friendly product with natural ingredients.
Tires are an amazing object in terms of chemistry and materials science. Perhaps the strangest thing about them is that if you take all the rubber in one tire, it turns out that it forms one huge molecule. On the other hand, few people think about the fact that rubber is less than half the mass of an ordinary tire. And why? And what else is included in the composition of tires besides rubber? We answer these questions in our material, created in partnership with tire manufacturer Toyo Tires.
Creating an ideal wheel is the most difficult optimization problem that mankind has been working towards for hundreds of years. There are a huge number of requirements for a wheel, but there are three main ones (“magic triangle”): high grip, low rolling friction and low wear. The tire on the way to this ideal wheel appeared not so long ago - only in the 19th century.
Wet traction allows the wheels to roll on the road without slipping and brake faster. The tread pattern is responsible for grip, as well as the tire surface itself and its chemical and adhesive properties.
Rolling friction is the force that resists wheel rotation. Generally speaking, rolling friction losses are due to inelastic deformations of the wheels. The stronger these losses, the more fuel is needed to drive the same hundred kilometers (no one has repealed the law of conservation of energy).
Tire wear is the simplest and most intuitive of these quantities. While driving, the wheel is subjected to millions of compressions and stretches, and each slowly but inexorably destroys the materials from which it is made. The more of these compression and stretch cycles a wheel can withstand, the longer it will last.
In the 1830s, the American inventor and chemist Charles Goodyear experimented with rubber, a natural polymer found in hevea sap. At that time, various companies were already trying to use rubber. For example, Charles Macintosh impregnated it with fabrics for the manufacture of waterproof raincoats, and Goodyear himself participated in the development of tubes for inflating lifeboats. Rubber was also used to make pencil erasers.
However, a serious disadvantage of natural rubber is that it deteriorates rapidly when exposed to air: oxidation of the polymer makes the material brittle and easily breakable. In order to rid him of this quality, the American chemist worked.
It is now clear that the instability of rubber is related to the very structure of the polymer. Rubber is cis-polyisoprene, and like many organic polymers, it can be thought of as a chain of carbon atoms, on which, with a certain step, small groups of other atoms are hung.
Rubber differs from extremely environmentally resistant polyethylene or polypropylene in that some of the bonds between the carbon atoms in its backbone are double. They are the weak point of natural rubber. Oxygen (more precisely, its active forms) is able to easily attack these multiple bonds and destroy them, while greatly changing the properties of the material as a whole.
In 1839, Goodyear discovered that a mixture of rubber and sulfur heated in an oven turns into an unusually dense black elastic material, much more stable than the original low-melting polymer mass. Some evidence indicates that this discovery was made by accident - allegedly the chemist simply dropped a rubber ball with sulfur on the stove. But on the other hand, it is known that Charles Goodyear studied the possibility of dehydrating rubber with sulfur. One way or another, the chemist managed to discover the process of vulcanization.
From the point of view of chemistry, the essence of this process is the transformation of a part of those same double bonds in rubber chains. Sulfur is capable of attacking them in the same way as oxygen, but instead of complete destruction, in the case of sulfur, so-called sulfide bridges are formed - strong bonds that connect adjacent rubber chains and form a network structure. The polymer becomes more elastic and dense, while the number of “weak points” in its structure decreases.
In the limit, we can assume that all rubber molecules in the vulcanized sample are bound into a single molecule by these sulfide bridges.
In 1888, British veterinarian John Dunlop created and patented a vulcanized rubber tire for his son's bicycle. In fact, it was an inflated hose attached to the wheel rim.
In 1895, the first vulcanized rubber tires were fitted to a car in the Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race. The authors of the idea are Andre and Edouard Michelin. Unfortunately, the car failed to win the race, to put it mildly, but nevertheless the car coped with almost 1200 kilometers of the track.
Simultaneously with the growing popularity of automobiles, the consumption of tires also grew, and in a couple of decades a huge new industry arose.
Why has vulcanized rubber become such a handy material for wheels? First of all, this is determined by the very trio of properties - adhesion to the surface, rolling friction and wear. Thanks to its elasticity, the rubber tire provides tight grip even on rough roads, and the absence of fragile elements reduces wear compared to metal or even more so wooden wheels.
It's worth noting that rubber tires are good for normal roads in many ways, but if we change the typical asphalt pavement to steel rails, the situation changes radically. Steel wheels have much less rolling friction - it is 5 or even 10 times less than modern car tires. The grip of steel wheels with the surface is largely determined by the weight of the train; this approach is not suitable for light vehicles.
But remember that rubber tires are also used on trains, for example on the M2 metro line of Lausanne (Switzerland). There they make it possible to deal with the high steepness of the paths, which would otherwise require a gear train.
In terms of mechanical properties, rubber is very good - there are still no cheap artificial analogues with the same properties. There is no secret in this - the chains of natural rubber are arranged in such a way that all the side ones "hang" strictly on one side of the chain. It is practically impossible to achieve the same in the industrial synthesis of rubber - the control over chain assembly that complex plant enzymes provide cannot be repeated by the relatively simpler organometallic Ziegler-Natta catalysts.
But there are also disadvantages, and they are not limited to the chemical instability of natural rubber. Rubber-bearing crops are grown mainly in Southeast Asia and Brazil, moreover, the raw material base is limited and hardly covers the entire demand for rubber.
Therefore, in tires, the share of natural rubber is only about 10-15 percent, and about 20 percent are artificial polymers - polyisoprene, polybutadiene, copolymers of polybutadiene with polystyrene and polyisobutylene. The main advantage of synthetic rubbers is their relatively greater resistance to oxidation and UV radiation.
The non-rubber part of the tire includes steel cords and various fillers: carbon black, silicon dioxide (the main component of glass and sand) and antioxidants. The role of antioxidants is to “trap” reactive oxygen species (such as ozone or peroxide) that are dangerous for rubbers and other polymers and turn them into harmless water or other molecules. In addition, various vulcanization activators, such as zinc oxide, remain in the tires.
Predicting exactly how different additives affect tire performance is difficult. To do this, it is necessary to simulate the behavior of micro- and nanosized particles, as well as the polymer chains and networks surrounding them at the nanolevel. For the first time in the tire industry, Toyo Tires has used molecular dynamics techniques to predict the energy loss in a tire from its microstructure.
Roughly speaking, the company's specialists are able to estimate how much the tire will heat up from hitting a bump on the road. It helps to understand how to reduce this heating. For example, calculations show that the suppression of the physical movement of rubber molecules reduces the same energy losses in tires. Therefore, in tires it is necessary to achieve stronger bonds between the polymer molecules and the filler.
It is interesting to note that molecular dynamics methods are often used to predict the behavior of protein molecules and to search for new drugs.
This and other developments by Toyo Tires related to the construction of tires at the nano level are part of the Nano Balance technology, which, at its core, allows you to design a material with the required optimal properties, and then create and test it.
Carbon black and silica can make up to 40 percent of the weight of an entire tire - their main role is to reinforce (strengthen) the vulcanized rubber. Such additives additionally increase the elasticity of the tire by 10-20 times, which reduces rolling friction.
It is worth noting that carbon black has been used in tires for quite some time, since about the 1920s. In recent decades, silicon dioxide has been increasingly used - it turns out to be much more effective in terms of reducing rolling friction and increasing grip on wet roads, and every percent of efficiency means not only a reduction in fuel consumption, but also a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. For this reason, silica tires are sometimes referred to as "green" tires.
But silicon dioxide has its problems. There is a principle in chemistry that like dissolves like. Unfortunately, rubbers and other polymers are chemically completely different from silicon dioxide, their point of contact can be compared to immiscible oil and water.
This means that by simply mixing the components, we will get separate large lumps of filler stuck together and separate blocks of rubber in which there is no filler. During compression-tension, the filler will crack and collapse, this will consume excess energy, which means that rolling friction will increase.
But here, too, there is a solution. To still mix oil with water and get an emulsion (like milk), you need surfactants like soap.
Same with tires - you need a substance that can cover the surface of silicon dioxide and "mask" it, making it look like the surrounding polymers. Such substances are, for example, bis-(triethoxysilylpropyl)tetrasulfide and its analogues. Their molecules consist of two parts, one of which easily binds to silicon dioxide, and the other to the vulcanized polymer network.
Even with such an almost perfect “cloaking agent”, one cannot do without a reliable technology for distributing it over the surface of the particles. If there are too few masking molecules, then the silicon dioxide particles will still stick together. The molecules of the masking agent, alas, are capable of aggregation by themselves - without binding to the surface of the particles. To combat this phenomenon, Toyo Tires, for example, has a special technique for high-precision mixing - controlling the ratio of various components in the mixture. It is based on the ability to monitor the rate of reaction between the masking agent and silica.
The tire industry estimates that since the 1890s, additives and wheel modifications have reduced rolling friction by about a factor of three.
The addition of silicon dioxide, in comparison with conventional carbon black, allows for increased grip on wet road surfaces. The point here is in the same principle “like dissolves in like”.
Soot and rubber are so-called non-polar substances, while water is polar, as is silicon dioxide. Polarity means that the molecule of a substance has an area with a small excess of negative charge and an area with a small excess of positive charge. In water, these are, respectively, an oxygen atom, on the one hand, and two hydrogen atoms, on the other.
It is interesting to note that both grip and rolling friction are actually controlled by the same parameter, the loss factor, or tg σ. It’s just that the loss coefficient at low strain frequencies in the tire is responsible for rolling friction, and the high-frequency one is responsible for traction. Therefore, with direct attempts to increase grip, rolling friction will also increase. As a result, it turns out that it is extremely difficult to increase both parameters simultaneously. That this has been done with silicon oxide is a great success.
The properties of the finished tire, as it is now clear, depend not only on the mass fractions of additives, but also on their distribution in rubber. And to check how the properties of the finished tires correspond to the predictions of the models, Toyo Tires attracted synchrotron methods, which allow you to directly, at the nanoscale, see how the material is deformed.
Synchrotron radiation is a type of X-ray radiation produced by elementary particle accelerators. Due to the short wavelength, such radiation easily penetrates through a thin plate of rubber compound, leaving shadows on the detector in place of filler particles. The high radiation intensity makes it possible to record "cinema" - changes occurring in the micro- and nanostructure of the sample in a fraction of a second.
So, for the first time in the tire industry, the company obtained synchrotron data on how filler particles behave evenly and unevenly distributed over the rubber compound. In the latter case, under the action of dynamic loads, additional energy losses occur.
By closely monitoring both the chemical composition and the behavior of rubber compounds at the microscopic level, scientists and engineers are getting closer to creating the perfect wheel.
