

Bikes made for racing and city bikes from Holland have different valve types that leave a lot of Americans scratching their heads. How do you deal with these fancy European tires? Read on, and I’ll tell you how a couple of bucks can save you a whole lot of frustration.



Most people in America are familiar with one type of valve on their bicycles. Most bikes we buy, and even our cars, mopeds, motorcycles, push carts, and hand trucks use the Schrader Valve.

Most pumps in the United States are ready to go … only on Schrader valves.

The bicycle industry has different thoughts on this issue, and so we have different valve types.



If you’re a real bike enthusiast, or you ride higher end bicycles, you should be familiar with the vaunted Presta Valve. I do not know the engineering reason for the switch to these skinny valves, but you can’t buy a bike in this country that is made for racing or big mountain bike jumps without running headlong into the presta valve wall. These fiddly little things confound countless people, and so I sell a bundle of brass presta to schrader adapters each month. We also do a brisk business is floor pumps that have a hole for either presta or schrader valves.

Everyone in the bike world in the US is with me so far, but here is where I lose 90% of the people: there is another valve type!

Yes, another type of valve.

“Why?”

I asked my self the very same question when I first encountered this valve type on bikes we imported from Holland. The answer is, “Deal with it.”

And so we do.



The third valve type is called a Dunlop (or Woods) Valve. These are standard issue on a lot of bikes on the European continent, and especially in Holland. In the US, they are a pain to deal with for most people, since they definitely do not work with a schrader valve pump head, and work very poorly with a presta valve pump head.

The solution? Buy yet another pump? Switch out the tubes on your expensive new bike? Give up bikes for rollerblades? No!



To pump up European tires you need to buy a presta-to-schrader valve adapter and screw it onto your dunlop valves. Boom, done. As arbitrarily as the bike industry has handed us theses three valve types to deal with, they have offered up a nice solution: the threads on the presta and dunlop valve are identical. A presta-to-schrader adapter is therefore a dunlop- or presta-to-schrader adapter.



We equip all of our Dutch bikes with an adapter, to save ourselves the inevitable phone call about this issue.

If you’d like a set of nice set of dunlop-to-schrader adapters you can buy them online here! It will cost a few bucks to ship a set of these anywhere in the US.