Finish Line FiberLink Sealant: At The Finish

Finish Line FiberLink Sealant: At The Finish – by Guitar Ted

The new Finish Line FiberLink Sealant has been in use for a bit over three months now. It is finally time to wrap up this review and see what I think about Finish Line’s newest sealant product. Is it better than what is out there already? Will it work when you need it to? How long should you expect this sealant to hold up in use before you need to maintenance it/refresh it? These are the questions I hope to have some answers for in this article.

If you missed the last, opening post on the FiberLink sealant, you can check in here and catch up on all the technical details. Here we go with the final take on this new sealant….

The FiberLink sealant was installed in the WTB Riddler 700 X 45mm tires at the beginning of this test, but later on that same sealant was transferred over to a set of the new WTB Vulpine 700c X 36mm tires. (Links take you to Riding Gravel reviews on each product) Then I transferred the sealant once more over to a set of 700c X 50mm Donnelly MSO tires.

So, this sealant has had more than its fair share of transfers and usage over the past three months. First I want to talk about how it held up from a maintenance/refresh standpoint, because I think this is one of the main drawbacks of tubeless set ups.

Latex based sealants for bicycle tubeless systems have the characteristic of drying out. Eventually you are going to have to deal with that in your set up. Either you will just refill with the correct amount, or (preferably) you would dismount at least one side of your tire, inspect the tape, replace the valve core and/or the valve, and clean out any dried up sealant residue. Since I had two opportunities to check out how the FiberLink sealant was doing over the past three months, I can report that very little, if any of the sealant dried up at all. In fact, I was able to recover 95% of what I had in the tires and reinstall that sealant into the next set or tires I used.

In terms of lifespan of FiberLink sealant, I would say that it should be superior to most popular sealants available now. There is one thing I ran across that might be an issue for anyone interested in how my transferring of sealant went. That is that due to the microfiber additive in FiberLink, it can clog up the plastic syringe nozzle if it is a small diameter. That is perhaps a show of FiberLink’s ability to seal up a puncture quickly, but in terms of sucking up sealant out of a tire, it is a bit annoying.

Speaking of puncture sealing, that is an area in which I cannot really give much feedback. Despite my running in the gutters through trash, glass bits, and whatnot, I could not get any noticeable punctures, and our gravel roads around here are not noted for tire-destroying tears or punctures. So, I only can point to how aggressively this sealant was in sealing up my small diameter syringe nozzle and surmise that in a real situation where a puncture happened that I would be satisfied with this sealant’s performance.

At The Finish: Okay, so FiberLink seems to have an impressive lifespan, it seems to have a pretty good ability to clog a sealant injector nozzle, so I assume a good performance in the field, and it seals up tire casings quite nicely. But, is it a better choice than the most popular brands?

In my experience, just the fact that Finish Line FiberLink can last as long as it has for me with barely any loss is something I give high marks for just because it puts off the hassle of tubeless sealant maintenance for a longer period of time. I’m reasonably sure I could rely on it for puncture protection, but that remains a question to be answered for me. So, in as far as these two things go, I would say yes- FiberLink is a better choice for many cyclists. Barely…. If I had some real-world puncture stories to tell with this review, I’d feel a lot more confident saying one way or the other.

I’m going to keep running FiberLink until it shows signs of drying out and maybe during that time I’ll gain some real-world puncture experience with it. Time will tell, but I am impressed enough with Finish Line’s efforts here to say that I would be okay recommending this sealant or using it as my main sealant in my tires.

Note: Finish Line sent over the FiberLink sealant for test and review to Riding Gravel at no charge. We are not being paid, nor bribed, for this review and we will always strive to give our honest thoughts and views throughout.

For more on FiberLink, you can check out the FiberLink webpage here.