Spending less than $30 I was able to remove 1.3 pounds of rotating weight from my fatbike. How? By replacing the Surly Toob and Rim Strip with lighter weight parts. Namely, a Kenda-manufactured Q-Tubes Superlight 26 x 2.4-2.75″ tube and some 2.25″ wide red polyester ribbon (photo). I decided to try these parts out after reading a number of forum threads about fatbike weight savings and discussing it with some local friends. This technique/setup is pretty well tested and should work out nicely.
I simply removed the heavier parts, looped some ribbon snugly over the rim holding it in place with a bit of gaffer tape (photo), and put the wheels back together with the Superlights. The significantly lighter tubes filled the tires evenly and the woven ribbon seems to be doing a fine job keeping the tube away from the nipples and edges of the holes in the rims.
For now I don’t see any reason why these lighter weight parts shouldn’t hold up as well as the originals. I suspect that having lighter weight wheels (especially with the weight savings coming from the outer edge) will be noticeable as well, particularly when accelerating.
Weight (or mass) for each of the components involved in this can be seen here:
| Actual | Original | New | Delta |
| R. Wheel | 9.20 lb | 8.56 lb | 0.64 lb |
| F. Wheel | 7.60 lb | 6.94 g | 0.66 lb |
| R. Tube | 464 g | 227 g | 237 g |
| F. Tube | 460 g | 229 g | 231 g |
| R. Strip | 83 g | 11 g | 72 g |
| F. Strip | 84 g | 11 g | 73 g |
Calculations based on the mass of the strips and tubes showed that there should have been slightly more savings (0.68 lb and 0.67 pounds for rear and front wheels, respectively), but I figure the difference is from the air put into the wheels. Using the rear wheel as an example Wolfram Alpha shows 36g (~0.4 lb) of air as having 28.2L of volume, which sounds about right, as I had the rear wheel inflated to ~30 PSI (to ensure the tire gets seated on the bead) when putting it on the scale.
Update (May 26, 2014): I experienced my first failure of this system. I’ll keep an eye on it, but there’ll be a little more maintenance required in the future because these tubes appear to fail early on due to exposure or overstreaching. Read about this here.
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