Want to lost some unwanted fat? Look to the tubes…

One of my close friends commented that the weight of my wheelset on my fatbike was more than his entire 29er single speed. It’s not uncommon to put a single fatbike wheel/tire combo on the scale and have it tip 7 lbs. Weight in your wheels is the absolute worst place to have it on your bike.

The first thing I do is take off the factory rubber rim strip which often weighs 120g and just use the plastic rim strip. Although it will eventually deteriorate, I should be able to swap it out with something else lightweight before it starts trashing tubes.

Best tubes for tires up to 4 inches on 100mm rims

Most tubes that come with factory fatbikes are more than 400g. The last one I weighed was 426g. I’ve tried a bunch of different tubes and the ones I’ve settle on is the Q-Tubes Super Light 26″ x 2.4-2.7″ 32 mm Presta Valve. I personally hate schrader valves because they seem to leak much more than the prestas. Any schrader rim will take a presta tube without modification. The Qtubes weigh in at around 244g. There is really no other way that you will be able to save 605 grams (240g by removing the rubber rim strips and 365g savings on the tubes) on a decent bike for just $20 and about 15 minutes of time.

I’ve used these tubes on tires as big as 4.8 inches with 80mm rims. I’ve purchased 10 of these tubes and run them at

A great article about different tubes you can try is here from fat-bike.com.

You can buy the q-tubes for about $10 each plus $4 shipping regardless of how many you buy from Treefort Bikes.

You can also go tubeless, but when weighed against a 244g tube you’ll find the weight savings are marginal. I think unless you want to run sub 7psi pressures tubeless is a waste of time and money and makes flats much harder to fix. A great video on going tubeless for fatbikes with gorilla taped rims is located here.

Ride on.

Update: I had one q-light tube stem get ripped off when the tire pressure was about 4psi and I loaned the bike to a friend of mine to ride. He was bunny hopping and getting big air when it ripped. That being said the hole on the rim was for a schrader valve and the tube was at extremely low pressure. If you are running presta tubes in schrader holed rims it might make sense to put a little gorilla tape around the valve stem so it doesn’t get cut off.