Hackaday 3D Prints a Usable Airless Mountain Bike Tire

The Project

You can buy airless tires for cars from Michelin and a handful of other companies, but good luck finding one for your mountain bike. Berm Peak, a maker known for extreme bike builds, decided to fix that gap with a 3D printer.

The result is a neon-green airless tire made from flexible TPU filament. It prints in sections that bolt to a separate 3D printed rim interface. Between the tread and the wheel rim sits a compliant S-shaped lattice that flexes to absorb bumps. The whole thing holds together well enough to ride on rough trails.

The Reality Check

The tire works, but the market already moved past the problem it solves. Tubeless mountain bike tires with sealant have essentially eliminated punctures for most riders. Spending hours printing a tire that costs more than a high-end pneumatic tire, and that rides worse, makes sense only as a weekend engineering project.

That is exactly what it is. The Hackaday video shows the tire surviving real off-road abuse, which is impressive for something printed on a desktop machine. The design could also be adapted for specialized applications where a pneumatic tire is simply not an option.

Airless car tires remain a different story. Michelin's Uptis and similar designs use a polymer mesh bonded to a rigid wheel, and they are slowly appearing on commercial vehicles. For bikes, though, the sealant revolution won. This project is a neat proof of concept, not a product you will see on trails next season.