First, pardon the rush of posts; I've been typing these up over several days, but due to life didn't get any of them finished till today, so there's several in a row for today.
Well, they're unused, so you could call them new, but they're recycled in that they come from a place selling stuff "salvaged" from old inventory from somewhere else--stuff that would probably have ended up in a landfill eventually if no one had bought the stock.
They're cheap enough that they don't even have a brand name on them, just "made in china", which if I had a choice I would avoid. But my budget being what it is (negative, actually having to skimp a lot on groceries to get these), I can't really not take a deal that gets me smoother road tires for a price I *can* skimp and live with, since they should help significantly (I hope) with a few issues I have with the current 24" MTB knobby and hybrid tires I've got.
So here's what they look like:
Then these are the others I've got for the rear
Now, the problem with this particular tire is that while it is slick enough in the very center, that's not a very wide strip,
*plus* it is rotting from wherever it sat before I got it, causing cracks like this one in the sidewall:
and there is a chunk that's actually missing out of it too:
Then the front gray powerchair tire:
which again has a narrow continuous strip in the very center, but is still knobby everywhere else, and you can feel it as you ride even at 50PSI (where I keep all the tires).
Thus with both of the existing tires, there's not as much contact patch for traction or for braking. The new tires fix that. I just have to install them (after some testing) and see how they perform.
EDIT: I forgot to put a pic of the 26" road tire and tread in, so here it is:
That center is not exactly like it looks; the very center line is a valley between the two halves, and the tread to either side curves *down* into it, to give a long trough for water/etc to be pushed into, leaving the tread on either side essentially in constant contact with the road, since it alternates back and forth overlappingly.
Friday, September 25, 2009
New Old Tires
2 comments:
Alternate suggestions or improvements to anything that's been posted is very welcome, and extreme detail is preferred to brevity.
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Knobby tires being so common doesn't seem to make much sense since most people ride on pavement all the time.
ReplyDeleteNo, it doesn't make sense but knobbies are what comes on just about every kids' bike and almost any bike you find in the big stores that sell the cheap junk bikes.
ReplyDeleteI have trouble even finding road-type tires at any place other than bike shops. Some of those big stores sell tires they *call* road tires, but they are still knobby, more like the MTB/road hybrid tire pictured above but often less continuous in the center. Never seen any slicks in those places.
Even Slime's attempt to break into the tubeless tire market supposedly included road tires, but the only ones I've seen were not road tires, they were still MTB tires with a more continuous center. They wouldn't post or send me pics of the ones they were still selling on their site, so I don't know if they ever made any *real* road tires.
I guess it's cheaper to make 10 million MTB tires than 5 million MTB and 5 million road.... That's probably the real reason they're so "popular".