Tubolito X-Tubo CX/Gravel

The Tubolito X-Tubo CX/Gravel inner tube is an expensive alternative to a butyl tube, but it does offer an improved, almost-tubeless-supple feel to your off-road ride. Tubolito is so confident in its puncture proof claims that the tube comes with a one-year warranty, but that doesn't make it impenetrable to sharps or pinches, and mending it is a lengthy process. It's light and rolls up small, which helps with portability when carried as a spare, but bringing it out to save a ride can be a fiddly affair depending on tyre size.

I've been around long enough to be deeply suspicious of any inner tubes that are any colour other than black. There were the green ones, and the blue ones, and the pink ones that looked like a cow's insides when they exploded out of a tyre, and those clear ones – all of which offered magical ride enhancement and alluring puncture protection but invariably had issues over and were all way more expensive than your cheap, easy to fix, know what you're doing, butyl inner tubes.

All of these revolutionary rainbow tubes quietly disappeared, although some of those colours are rotating back again to tempt a new generation of cyclists... And so now we have orange inner tubes from Tubolito. Would my prejudices on coloured tubes be justified, or would I find I've been suffering confirmation bias and be pleasantly surprised?

Tubo stats

Tubolito does a full range of tubes to fit anything from your old school skinny 18mm road bike tyres to your 16in-wheeled folding bike and your 29er 2.3in fat mountain bike and everything in between. The ones here are designed for 32-50mm 700C tyres, and specifically cyclocross and gravel bikes.

Tubolito tubes are made of TPU, which stands for Thermoplastic Polyurethane, a very elastic and flexible material. It's smooth to the touch but at the same time, says Tubolito, extremely durable and strong.

The particular tubes on test use Tubolitio's X-Tubo technology (other tubes come under its standard rating and its superlight S-Tubo). It's designed to be a sturdier tube to suit the harsh environments that cyclocross, gravel, city and touring bikes find themselves in. Tubolito says they're extremely resistant, promising no punctures in everyday use, and backs this up with a one-year warranty for registered X-Tubo tubes. I raised an eyebrow at this bit.

Weight

One of Tubolito's claims that isn't up for discussion is the tube's light weight and small pack size. The X-Tubo CX/Gravel is very light compared with the random selection of standard butyl inner tubes picked from the dusty pile. Tubolito claims 131g on the box (ours came in at 136g), and the weight difference increased as butyl sizes grew to match the orange tube's range of up to 50mm. Thinner CX butyl tubes were about 30g heavier, and a larger gravel tube weighed over 60g more, so if you've spent time shaving weight off the rest of your bike then these would be an easy and good value £ for lb investment, and easily scratch your rotating weight itch, if that's your thing. And if you're concerned about the bulk of an inner tube in your rear pocket spoiling the lines of your jersey, or would appreciate the extra space you might gain in a saddle bag then they're a worthwhile look.

For the gravelly bikepacker who considers pack space a premium and is the sort to weigh different sleeping mats and needs a spare tube or two 'just in case' their tubeless setup fails, then a tightly rolled Tubolito will easily hide in the corner of a frame bag and allow valuable extra room for snacks or whatever.

However, because they're more delicate in build it's a good idea to wrap them with something protective if you're going to have them rubbing up against tools, and that valve does look a little fragile, too, by the way.

Fitting

It's a fight to fit the X-Tubo CX/Gravel tube into a tyre at the lower end of its designated range, where it's more CX than Gravel. Deflated and flat, the tube measures 44mm across, while blown up so there's just enough air in to hold its shape and ease installation, it's 30mm in diameter – both of which make it a struggle to squeeze or fold into a 33mm cyclocross tyre.

Also, as the Tubolito tube is shiny and slippery it's very much like wrestling a greased eel into a tight hole; thumb it in one bit of the tyre and it pops out another bit. It's certainly not an operation I'd relish if I was using a Tubolito as a lightweight spare and trying to do this by the side of the road with cold hands.

Also, because of its gossamer construction it feels precarious wrestling it into a tyre, and extra extra care is needed when popping the last inches of a tyre onto a rim, especially if you have to resort to levers. If it's a tight-fitting combo then pinch puncture panic is sweatingly high. Luckily that orange colour does help with making sure the tube isn't nipped between rim and tyre.

Fitting the tube gets easier once you're playing with 40mm-and-above tyres, so if you're more gravel based then it should be faff free.

The valve is 60mm in length (for the non-X-Tubo it's 42mm or 60mm), and there's no thread on it and therefore no tightening grommet thing (what are they called?), but as I don't use them anyway this wasn't much of an issue, and there hasn't been any trouble with slippage or rattle. That valve does feel brittle, though; be tender with the track pump head.

Puncture proof

Testing didn't start so well with a puncture two miles from home. Ooops. Seduced by the super smooth ride feel of the Tubolito tube at a low off-road pressure rolling inside a supple tan-sidewalled tyre, I pinch punctured on an innocuous rock on a farm track. Ah. I'll happily take the blame for that. Tubolito does say that, in spite of its puncture resistance claims, its tubes do have similar characteristics as traditional rubber tubes when it comes to snake bite resistance.

Tubolito says it had a had a clear and ambitious goal when developing the X-Tubo and that was to produce a bicycle inner tube that cannot be punctured. It built tubes made of different materials, produced them with different methods and then subjected them to various tests that in day-to-day use the tubes might roll through – across thorns, pieces of broken glass and over its exclusively developed ramp equipped with a nail. Tubolito eventually found a product which satisfied its high expectations of making punctures a thing of the past, and backed it up with a one-year warranty for all kinds of flats.

While we're here, mending a punctured Tubolito tube is more complicated, expensive and takes more time than a standard inner tube. Because of their TPU construction they need a special patch (it's made from the same material) and glue. It costs £5 for a pack containing glue, five alcohol cleaning tissues, five small patches and five large ones.

Fixing is, in essence, just like a normal puncture – once you clean the area round the hole with the alcohol patch, you spodge the glue on, wait a while for it to become tacky, then press the patch down and hold it firm with your thumb for a minute, and then you have to leave it for another 30 minutes to cure properly. This makes it a 'do at home with a cup of tea' job rather than a quick roadside fix.

One of the pinch punctures I had was on the fold of the tube. The Tubolito returns to its very flattened state when deflated, and the thinness of the tube means that fold is quite sharp – which meant it was a real pain to get the patch to stick, and took a couple of tries.

Wheel world testing

The ride feel of the Tubolito tube is lovely. It's somewhere close to the suppleness of a tubeless system, and the bigger the CX/gravel tyre you pop one in, the more you seem to benefit from it, so if you're averse to the concept of a tyre full of gloop and the issues that can sometimes occur then these orange tubes could be the answer, although, as demonstrated above, they don't have the 'carelessly smash the tyre into anything' resilience of a tubeless system. Because they're such a thin and squishy tube you might want to compensate by putting a few extra psi into them than your usual, to prevent unwanted rim impacts and tyre squirm; the quality of your tyre and silkiness of the sidewall will determine this to a large degree.

I spent a long time testing the Tubolito inner tubes to try to put holes in them, and for a significant while they did very very well. I run tubes on my 33mm CX tyres and tubeless on my fatter tyred gravel bike with 40mm-ish and above tyres, and during testing partnered the Tubolito tubes with both for comparison.

I ride in the land of the hawthorn and the flint, and punctures on a skinny CX can be every-ride common if you're having a bad week, and despite not holding back testing the Tubolitos, doubts about their puncture resistance pretty much disappeared from my mind as it just wasn't happening. Despite their light weight, I didn't experience any significant annoying air seepage over time either.

The science of evaluating puncture resistance is an inexact one at the best of times, but in relation to a lifetime of previous experiences I'd put these down as surviving very well. This was a good thing as being a tubeless convert I wasn't keen to go back to saving up punctured tubes to do a drawn-out patching session on a rainy evening.

I did eventually force a puncture on the Tubolito, a failure that only became apparent the day after a ride, with a disappointing morning flat, which no one wants.

On inspection there was one obvious hole in the tube, and then further old school 'tube in a bowl of water' checks revealed another four pinprick punctures, and also one of the patches giving up the will to stick, all of which is an impressive fail. That would be comprehensive work to fix with Tubolito's patching time and quicker to try to return under warranty than mend all the punctures. If this was a butyl tube with that many holes in I'd bin it, or put it in the bag of dead tubes to send off to a company that makes wallets and bags out of them.

Value

At over three times the price of a standard butyl inner tube, the Tubolito is a hard sell no matter the benefits.

That said, it's smack bang in the middle of similar offerings from Pirelli and Eclipse.

The Eclipse Road Tube is £26 and has similar supple ride characteristics but a longer puncture mending time with special patches. Shaun tested the skinny road fit, but a 30-45mm gravel tyre version is available.

The Pirelli Cinturato SmarTUBE, which is made from the same material, is £29.99, comes in a gravel-friendly size and shares a lot of the features of the Tubolito: its light weight and puncture resistance, comes in a funky colour, and needs a specialist patch.

Conclusions

Would I fit these in my gravel bike? No. I'm a full-on devotee to tubeless for that and it's been a fair old while since I've had a puncture that's required a tube.

Would I fit these in my skinnier tyred cyclocross bike? Maybe. I've tried tubeless on thinner off-road tyres and it tends to be a little more fickle than with girthier rubber, so tubes can be more reliable – and one that gives a little extra suppleness to a tyre is a good thing for off-road use. If you're into CX racing and are also tubeless averse and don't fancy stumping up the commitment to tubs then the Tubolito tubes would be a very viable option.

Would I carry a Tubolito as a spare? Probably not. While the smaller pack size and lighter weight are definite bonuses, their fragility while being squished in a bag would worry me, and the playing snooker with rope antics of fitting one into a thinner tyre by the side of the trail would be a real no no for me, and I'd only want to use them on tyres at the fatter end of their range.

If I'm putting a spare tube in then I need something reliable that I know is going to get me home and if that fails can be easily fixed. The Tubolito tube still doesn't quite fill me with that amount of confidence.

Verdict

Light and supple alternative to a normal tube or tubeless, but expensive and still not resistant to punctures that are fiddly to fix