Jim’s Tech Talk
By Jim Langley
In last week’s column, we provided a solution to fix flat tires on e-bikes with difficult-to-remove rear wheels (the most common wheel to puncture). The solution was to fix the flat by patching the tube and not even bother to remove the wheel at all. Here’s that article if you missed it: Fixing a Flat Without Removing the Wheel.
Flat tires are always a popular topic and after reading the article, two readers, Tom Petrie and Mark H Linehan, wrote in telling me about a new product from Denmark that’s made for the purpose. It’s called the Gaadi tube (about 26 Euros from https://gaadi.de/en/). Thanks guys!!
I haven’t tried the tube but it looks ingenious in their video, which is below so that you can watch and see how it works. It differs from standard tubes in that it’s cut in half directly across from the valve. The open ends of the tubes are sealed.
This means that it can be installed simply by inserting the valve in the wheel and then tucking the two ends up inside the tire.
Once the tire is reinstalled, when the tube is inflated, it expands in both directions bringing the sealed ends up against each other and filling the width and diameter of whatever size tire you’re running (from 16-29”).
The old way of doing it
The idea of cutting a tube like this and installing it to fix a flat is not new. When tubular tires (also known as “sew-up” tires – because the tube is literally sewn inside the tire) were popular, that’s how a bad tube was replaced (“bad” meaning that it couldn’t be patched, which is an easier – though still challenging repair).
Tubulars were among the most expensive tires so people went to great lengths to keep their best tires rolling. To replace a tube though was an advanced skill.
But it was possible with the same approach as the Gaadi tube. The difference was that the ends of the replacement tube for the tubular tires were just the open cut ends of the tube since a standard latex tube was used as a replacement.
And what made the tube replacement tricky, was managing to glue the ends of the tube together again without there being any leaks. Let me know if you ever need to do it and I will be happy to explain the process in detail, but suffice to say that it’s not something many people got right on the first try unless an expert was showing them how to do it.
Other tubes that work like the Gaadi
While writing this, I recalled seeing another split tube like the Gaadi a few years ago, and I could be wrong, but I think it was made by Specialized. I tried searching to find it online and didn’t succeed. But another tube that looks similar to the Gaadi tube in some ways did come up in the search, called the Reebike from France.
If I remember correctly, I think that the previous tube I saw wasn’t very successful at least in the marketplace. Quickly looking at the Reebike tube, they are sold in different sizes, which is different from the Gaadi.
Your turn
Thanks again to Tom and Mark for the tip and if you know of other split tubes or would like to share your experience using them, please leave a comment as it will be a great help to other readers looking for this flat tire solution.
Jim Langley is RBR’s Technical Editor. A pro mechanic & cycling writer for more than 40 years, he’s the author of Your Home Bicycle Workshop in the RBR eBookstore. Tune in to Jim’s popular YouTube channel for wheel building & bike repair how-to’s. Jim’s also known for his cycling streak that 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.
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