A mountain biker called Berm Peak got tired of waiting for Michelin's airless tire promises and printed his own from TPU on a home 3D printer. The design uses an S-shaped compliant lattice between the tread and rim, printed in sections and joined directly onto a standard bike rim via a separate printed interface. No air, no sealant, no flats.
The engineering process is where this article earns a full read. Multiple design iterations failed before the S-shaped geometry survived real trail conditions. The sectioned construction solves the obvious problem of printing a round tire without a printer the size of a wheel, and the rim interface solution is specific enough to steal for your own builds.
The punchline is a legitimate engineering lesson: airless tires solve a problem that tubeless sealant already solved for mountain bikers years ago. The neon-green TPU result holds up under hard off-road use, which is impressive for a shop-built prototype, but it arrives about a decade too late to matter for its intended use case. That gap between clever solution and relevant problem is worth sitting with.
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