Everyone knows tubeless tyres are fantastic once you get ‘em mounted, right? Fantastic that is until a rogue rock or sharp pointy thing causes air inside to rush out when you least want it to.

Most of us have had this happen at some point, and even the best mountain bike tyres can rip or tear when scraped across pointy rocks or unyielding roots. Big holes are too much for even the best tubeless sealant either, because it can only block modest punctures rather than proper gashes.

Stan’s Incredible DART Tubeless Repair Tool

Step in Stan’s Incredible Dart Tubeless Repair Tool tyre plugger; an on-the-trail solution to ‘repair and seal large punctures and slices in tyres faster and easier than traditional tyre plugs’.

The traditional way being to poke through the hole in the tyre casing with a metal barb holding a looped-over rubber worm or strip, extract the poker and leave the rubber in place to seal. The sealant inside does the rest and forms an air tight seal between the rubber worm and the tyre casing, so you can re-inflate and get on with your riding.

In many instances, this works fine and I’ve had tyre plugs that’ve stayed in place for months or even years. Unfortunately, it’s also common (especially riding and braking in very rough and rocky terrain and having a puncture on a rear tyre crown) that tyre plugs can ripped right back out of the hole and leave you with the exact same problem you started with.

Stans Dart aims to address this by offering a more robust, two-tier solution of both a chemical and mechanical seal that locks the flappy dart inside the tyre and is far less likely to be ripped out.

Stan’s Incredible DART Tubeless Repair Tool

Components

The Dart design has a patent-pending, umbrella-shaped, rubber flange with a pointy plastic tip on a slim steel rod. This is jabbed through the hole in the tyre to the inside where it then expands, overlaps and remains intact. The sonically-welded plastic tip and rubber ‘anchor’ spread out inside the tyre casing and once the puncture has been sealed, it’s much harder for the Dart design to rip out while riding than a traditional rubber plug.

More than just a flappy little rubber umbrella, Stans design goes further because the layers of laser-cut material contour and splay out to cover different punctures sizes and maximize surface sealing. It does this because by covering a bigger internal surface area, but also because the Dart is treated to cause a ‘simple and safe’ chemical reaction with Stans (or other latex) sealant to form a permanent airtight bond.

Stan’s Incredible DART Tubeless Repair Tool

The dart also doesn’t require trimming once in place like a traditional rubber plug, so there are no rubber tails sticking out that make it easier to scuff and catch on the ground and rip out.

The head of the tool holding each dart is double-sided and reversible, and can hold two sealed darts on each side. This means it’s possible to install two plugs in succession quickly when sealing the largest slices and punctures, and the small plastic carry case also has a valve core remover built in.

Stan’s Incredible DART Tubeless Repair Tool

Performance

Stans Dart works great. The slim pointed tip and thin-shafted design is easy to poke through holes and rips, and it’s a big advantage not having to pull the plug insertion tool back out through the same hole like normal plugs. I’ve struggled numerous times to get a plug to stay put in some punctures before because of this, and it’s not an issue here; once the dart has pushed through, it’s staying put.

Being easy to jab through means also not having to ream out the hole bigger than it already is, which can be the case with some traditional rubber strips to accommodate whatever rubber plug size you have. This means you don’t potentially damage the tyre further pulling the sharp tool back out. Of rival solutions, I’ve found Peaty’s one-sided fishhook style insertion tool is better than most, but you can’t really beat just leaving a dart inside to splay out and potentially cover a bigger area.

Stan’s Incredible DART Tubeless Repair Tool

Another advantage is that I’ve also damaged rim tape in the past by trying to poke plugs in to a squidgy deflated tyre and stabbing at the rim well accidentally with the sharp metal tool. If you do this, no plug is going to be effective as air can escape on the rim side and there’s no chance of doing this with Stans plastic tip and a ‘stopper’ on the metal loader spike to stop it from being pushed too deep.

I’ll have to take the brand’s word for it that the chemical reaction between the dart’s flappy wings and the sealant is creating a stronger bond, but the evidence I have is that no tyre I’ve put a dart into has lost air yet or ripped out when riding.

Another brand, Dynaplug, offer a similar two-stage (mechanical and sealant) based solution with metal tipped plugs where you use bigger and smaller tips for different sized punctures and I’ve also had good results them, although the initial entry price is higher with Dynaplug’s insertion tool. Both designs successfully increase longevity of tyres though, and considering most top tubeless rubber costs upwards of £60, the Dart suddenly looks like better value if it means you can use the tyre until it wears out, rather than worrying that having a plug in it is only a temporary fix.