YouTuber 3D-prints airless bike tire and puts it through extreme off-road testing

Berm Peak, a YouTube channel author, set out to find out why airless tires, teased for decades by Michelin and other manufacturers in futuristic concepts, never made it to mass-produced vehicles. Instead of a conventional pneumatic wheel, such tires use a polymer mesh that maintains pressure on the road surface without air. In theory, the design promises less maintenance, but in practice it has remained in the realm of myths alongside Half Life 3 and an affordable Volkswagen.

For the experiment, the blogger chose not his electric pickup truck but a mountain bike—an environment where punctures are especially annoying. After several design iterations, he settled on a version made of thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) with S-shaped spacers between the tread and the rim. The tire was printed in sections that were joined together directly on the wheel using a separate printed adapter.

During harsh off-road testing, the homemade tire showed surprisingly high durability. The blogger admitted that a specialized company could make such a design even more reliable, but noted that the problem airless tires solve has already been addressed by another technology. Modern mountain bikers almost universally use sealant, so punctures are essentially a non-issue for them.

Still, the neon-green wheels became a striking project and turned heads on the trails. The experiment confirmed that printing a functional airless tire at home is feasible, but there is little mass-market point to it for now.