Wire wheels and tyre inner tubes

[softfeet]

Many of you are using wire wheels on your cars. Are you using tubes with these? I understand that you are supposed to, unless the wire wheels are specifically designed to run without tubes, and these wheels are rare.

But tubes have their own issues – you cannot use tyres less than 70 profile with them; there is some belief that a puncture is safer in a tyre without a tube; although tubes can be put in tubeless tyres, care must be taken to ensure that the inside of the tyre is ‘smoothed’.

The restriction to 70 profile should not be a problem – I do not want to go lower because it will not look ‘period’, but many tyres are now 65 or 60 profile as standard, so tyre choice may be limited.

The belief that a puncture is safer in a tyre without a tube arises because in a puncture the tube would pop like a balloon and the air would escape into the space between the tube and the tyre and then out through the hole where the valve sits leading to almost instant deflation. Whereas with a tubeless tyre, the air would escape much more slowly through the hole in the tyre made by the puncture.

When fitting tubes in tubeless tyres, the inside of the tyre must be carefully checked for projections (ridges, labels, etc) and these should be removed before fitting. If not, they could chafe on the tube and cause unseen wear and possible failure. Tyre fitters would need to be made aware of this if they did not already know.

I am going to use 14” wheels on my special (not a Sammio but uses Spitfire chassis parts), probably with 155 or 165 section tyres. So I would be looking at 155/70R14, 165/70R14, 155/80R14 or 165/80R14. And I would need to use tubes.

There is a very wide choice of tyres in the 165/70R14 size, but very little is available in the other sizes.

I like the Avon ZT5, but the 155 14 is only available as a 65 profile tyre so could not be used with tubes. The 165 14 is available as a 70 profile, however.

Sorry for the long post, and sorry if it is in the wrong place, but there are lots of active ‘wire wheel’ users here!