Beadlock wheel question

Took the wheels off the wife machine tonight to have the beadlocks powder coated. The wheels are Raceline 14x7 Mamba beadlocks and the tires are 31x10x14 Roctanes. One of the beadlocks was bent to hell so I beat it back out flat, going to powder coating tomorrow. Found a new set on ebay for cheap so I ordered them as spares. To my surprise the previous owner had tubes in all the tires. IMO it kinda defeats the purpose of beadlocks. I have never used tubes with beadlocks....anyone seen this before? something I am missing?

I would guess they leaked down in a couple days like most beadlocks and previous owner put the tubes in. But yeah it does defeat the purpose. May be handy to pack a tube or 2 in the rzr on rides.

People run tubes in beadlocks for various reasons. Mostly because the they have a slow leak or they want to run real low air pressure for rock crawling. It's a bit of added insurance. With anything there is give and take. The rims may be fine, but you wont know till you mount them up. One thing that helps when tubeless is bead sealer. You can pick up a can at Napa. Paint the tire bead and wheel bead before mounting. Also i put it on the valve stem area where it passes thru the wheel. Make sure the threads are clean in the wheel for the beadlock bolts. . It doesn't take much torque to strip out if they are aluminum. If your running tubes than a couple of tricks to make the tube last longer. One is to coat the tube with baby powder before inserting it into the tire. It will make it slide around easier inside the tire. After assembly, inflate the tire, than deflate, that re-inflate to the pressure you want. Kinda helps the tube flatten out a bit and conform to tire if there were some creases in it. Another thing is to put some silicone around the valve stem and rim hole. That will help keep water and dirt from working its way in between tube and tire. One thing about beadlocks , you can easily shove a tube in the tire, on the trail to get you home, if the hole is too big to plug. Just my forgetful 2 pesos.

The tubes are coming out and will go into the tool box for emergency trails repairs. Tubes will not allow the tire to wrinkle like it should. Just never heard of anyone using tubes with beadlocks. I run 3-4psi with beadlocks and never have had any issues with leakdown. But I also make sure the beads are cleaned very well and sealed when I mount them.

A good coat of grease works just as well as bead sealer. FYI. An old-school farmers trick.

Never seen tubes in beadlocks but have seen tire balls and tire blocks. More for desert racing though.

I use to run Staunch bead locks on my Jeep before I switched to Raceline 5-6 years ago. Stauns are basically just a short tube used to compress both beads against the wheel. They were a bit of a hassle so I sold them and switched to conventional 32 bolt bead locks. I do see some Krawlers running tubes and conventional bead locks but that is usually do to dead tires that won't hold air.

The previous owner had tubes in three of the four tires, and the fourth had the beadlock silconed on and the tires filled with Slime  I also found silcone in many of the beadlock bolt holes in the other rims which I had to run a tap in to clean them out. The tubes were an attempt to fix leaking beadlocks as they were not seated properly. The tubes were for 15/16 LT tires also   Anyways, all cleaned up, beadlocks powder coated and tires holding air just fine...amazing how people rig stuff insted of fixing it.

Sadly, a lot of people seem to think rigging is cheaper. Might be on day one but after all the frustration it is usually cheaper to do it right the first time. Glad you got it figured out.