A friend of mine was good enough to bring me a couple of bottles of green slime tire sealant to Thailand as it's not available to buy here!

The slime bottles have been sitting on my shops patio table for about a week now & discussions over the course of a few beers have brought up a few interesting questions.

I got an SF with road tires & inner tubes on my bike, it does 95% road riding & some gravel tracks & the occasional bit of riding on the firm edge of our beaches. Punctures are pretty rare here, as no desert cactus or thorns around. Just usual road hazzards/debris etc

My friend says I should put an 8oz (250ml) bottle in each tire & it will be a puncture preventative or no flat tires for 2 years. Or at least get me home without dumping the bike with a complete flat in a dodgy area at 2am for example. (the last point is most important to me).

The couple of questions that come to mind are:

1. If I leave the bike parked up for a longtime or even a short time, will the slime pool at the bottom of the tires? Seems weird to have pools of gloopy slime every time I pull away from cold!!

2. Will slime effect my wheel balancing? Or even help balance as a bonus!

3. It goes against the grain to put 8oz of weight in my tires to add to the unsprung weight, which means everything in handling terms to a race team. Does it effect handling in fast corners?

I was really keen to get this stuff in my tires when it arrived but the more I think about & the longer I look at this stuff, the less I want to use it!!

Any thought or first hand user reviews on slime are very welcome

 

My thoughts are that slime is designed to be used with tubeless tires. Personally i would never put it in a tube.

 

I Slime my offroad tires, and carry an 8oz. bottle with me on rides. It's saved my butt once. Obviously if the valve stem is torn or there's some other major hole, Slime isn't going to get you home. But one time I ran over a roofing nail, and my clueless buddy said "Hey, you've got a nail in your tire!" and pulled it out. The tire went flat in seconds! I stuck Slime in the tire and used a CO2 inflator to air it up, and rode it the rest of the day. Actually, that tube was still holding air a week later when I replaced it.

Based on that experience, I Slime my offroad tires. If for no other reason, it makes me feel better. As for what it does to the tire balance, unsprung weight, etc., I have no idea. I run ultra heavy duty tubes which weigh pounds, not ounces, so a little Slime isn't going to make much more of a difference.

 

I use slime on lawn mower, wheelbarrow, and hose reel cart tires, but only as a last resort on anything else. As mentioned above^ probably not a good idea on tube tires; just in my opinion. If you've ever tried to patch a tire (car, etc.) that has been slimed, you're ready for a stiff drink when you finish. I like and have used the "snot strings" to patch nail holes, and always keep a kit in my vehicles, but as for Slime....nah.
(Seems to work for Mike^ and that's cool. It's all good.)

 

I wouldn't use it personally

 

I use it on my Tubliss setup. It will plug holes as big as a nail, which surprised me. I'm not sure about using in a tube-system, though.

 

There are two kinds of Slime...Slime for tubes and Slime for tubeless. The mixture for each is a differrent design. My experience from working in motorcycle shops and bicycle shops with pneumatic tires is that Slime in a tube can provide some mediocre protection while tubeless Slime in a tubeless tire is tremendously effective. Still, I would only run Slime in tubeless off road application where I didn't spend the majority of my time on pavement. For me, tubeless Slime in my dirt bike Nuetech Tubliss setup always gave a little bit of a lumpy ride.

As far as balance goes, something like Stan's sealant originally developed for mountainbike tubeless tires works a bit better than Slime as far as having little to no effect on balance. The thinner mixture apparently spreads out quicker in the tire. Also, Slime is horribly messy if you end up having to fix a flat that the Slime didn't seal.

 

this is a good video to watch on what slime green can do...it's a 13 minute video...i forget which part he uses the slime green as a temporary fix, but see what happens...

Long Beach, NY to Long Beach, CA on a $200 Motorcycle on Vimeo

i think it's only suppose to be used in emergencies and is only a temporary fix...

 

My kids puncture tubes on a daily basis. Not sure how they find all the thorns, but they do. I filled their tubes with slime and it sealed the holes and haven't had a puncture since. I put it in my old KX125 tube and it sealed a slow leak. I wouldn't put it in a bike that will do 50mph as it will mess with the balance.

 

I have slime and HD tubes in the KLX and have used it for years in the bicycles. Not looking forward to the mess if I get a bad puncture. I don't notice any balance issues at speed (up to 70+), but it may be there. Wheels aren't very balanced in the first place with rim locks and some weights on the opposite sides.