Typical street tires are tubeless, meaning they don’t need a tube to hold air once they are seated in the bead of the rim. Supermoto rims have spokes, which are not sealed and therefore you have to use a tube on a tubeless tire. My friends and I were happily on our way mounting the tires, inserting the tubes and balancing the wheels once inflated. However what I didn’t know (being new at this) was that I needed to cover the spoke ends on the inside of the rim with something as they can have sharp edges. This is information that would have been handy sooner than later as you will soon find out.

Once back in my garage, my friend and I ran into a multitude of problems trying to get the new wheels mounted, not big problems, just little things because we were turning this bike into something else. To begin with we couldn’t use the stock sender for the speedometer, the spacer in the sender does not come out, and the spacer in the new wheel is design to not use the sender. Oh well, who needs to know how fast you are going??? In addition there were other items that we had to dismantle in order to install the ridiculously fat 5” wide rear rim. Those items will have to be modified soon so that I don’t have to remove the chain guides and other such things every time I have to change a tire.

After a little work and some banged up fingers, the bike was together and ready to take some short test rides. We rode up and down the parking lot a few times, paying some attention to the squeaky new wheels (which apparently was normal) and the slick new tires. But it was a fun ride none the less. The next evening I could not wait to get out and actually ride the bike on the road and see what it could do. It was almost dark when I finally got out and that little bit of information about taping the rims was about to get me. I got about 2 miles away, and while going through a corner the rear end of the bike was VERY loose. Yes, because I failed to cover the nipples ends on the inside of the rim, they ripped a hole in the tube and I was quickly going flat. Very thankfully I was able to ride home and the next day went through another round of taking the tires and tubes out, taping the rims, and putting everything back together.