Thread: Series rims and tubes

Gosh. I've removed the tyres from 10 series wheels and every single one has had a tube in it. None are military. I assumed the rims are not tubeless. Sorry I don't know the categorical answer for you, but I'll be interested to see what comes out.

I have found most of my rims have the centres riveted in the rim. Some of these rivets are not air tight and tubeless tyres slowly deflate.
Also, the Bridgestone 750/16 tyres I run are labelled "Tube Type".

Thanks, sounds like I should be getting tubes put in when the tyres get put on. The tyre man suggested that on old rims sometimes the bead area can rough up and become leaky, so sometimes that run tubes.

Hi Simon
I think you will find that the series rims are more of an agricultural origin and as such come without a bead rim( the lip that runs around the wheel that the tyre pops over to locate against the edge of the inside rim). This is a roadworthy legality. If you do not have this lip you legally must run tubes. On the alloys they have the lip and run tubeless. It is a safety issue as if you have a blowout at speed on a non lip wheel with no tube the loss of control could be immediate and very ordinary.
In saying this though my tubes that run in the defender wheels are the second air type beadlocks so effectively they run like a tubeless though some rubber is clamped to the rim should a flat occur at speed.

All Series Landrovers were fitted with tubes from new. Tubeless tyres had been invented about the time that the Landrover was invented (patent for first successful version applied for in 1946), but did not become widely accepted until the 1970s.

Almost all current rims feature a raised ridge a couple of centimetres in from the shoulder that holds the bead. This is designed to hold the bead in place even if the tyre is deflated, and was invented about 1960, becoming a standard feature in the 1980s. No Series rims have this.

Tubeless tyres have been fitted to rims without this shoulder from the first tubeless tyres, as it did not exist then. The extra safety it provides does not, as far as I can see, apply to tubeless tyres any more than tubed ones - a tyre deflated enough to leave the shoulder is not going to provide significant sideways resistance anyway, and while a tubeless tyre will immediately lose all pressure as soon as the tyre leaves the shoulder, it is rare that a tubed tyre will hold are much longer, as the tube is almost certain to suffer serious damage as soon as this happens.

Despite this, the tyre industry seems to have adopted in their code of practice that the extra shoulder has to be there for tubeless tyres, but I am not aware of any legal requirement, except of course for the general requirement that you cannot change to a lower safety standard than originally fitted - thus, for example, a later Defender cannot legally be fitted with early 90/110 wheels that lack this shoulder - and quite probably should not be fitted with tubes either, as it is generally considered that these are less safe than tubeless, especially at high speed (due to heat buildup).

John