It's been a long time, and now my son rides and I need something to go with him. My Haro V3 has been sitting a long time now, and the Kenda Komodos on it are trashed. I need a 25x2.1" tire that's decent for urban and sandy desert trail. This is not something that was ever in my body of knowledge and I don't even know where to start. I could just order some stuff on Amazon, but I'd prefer to ask.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: P220 Smudge,

I’ve had panaracer and it was okay on pavement but lacking on sandy trails, most noticeably when going uphill.

I’ve switched to maxxis ardent and pretty happy with them on all types of trails (while adjusting pressure) but they are a bit slow on pavement.

But i avoid pavement. Ymmv.

I think I use continental tubes. Always happy.

https://www.amazon.com/Kenda-S...id=674469&th=1&psc=1

I used to have these on my mountain bike. they are great!!! if you ride alot of sand you might want to look at something else but these are ok in sand and spectacular on pavement and hardpack

Are you infested with GOATHEADS like we were in Cochise County? If so, you might want something with Kevlar or solid tubes.

quote:

Originally posted by Johnny 3eagles:
Are you infested with GOATHEADS like we were in Cochise County? If so, you might want something with Kevlar or solid tubes.

You know, I found my first one a few weeks ago. It was in the laundry room. Of course I wasn't wearing shows, and I had to pull it out of my foot.

Good point. Everything in the desert wants to kill you.


Konata, Ronin, I'm looking at those tires now. I have a question. If I had 26x2.1" tires before, will a wider tire work alright? I know it all depends, but generally speaking. Both of those are a hair wider than what I had before.

www.competitivecyclist.com and similar sites give optimum availability.

Local bike stores have nothing.

I always used Continental town & country tires for mtb.

On my bikes, I’ve been able to comfortably add about 0.5” wider tires than stock. Maybe easier with disk brakes. Just need to avoid rubbing against frame or shocks. I prefer narrower for hardpack. But I’ve been doing sandy trails and wider has been better going uphill and curves.

Wider may be more limited with rim brakes.

Oh wait, you were asking about diameter. I’ve never changed diameter from stock.

No, I meant width. These Kendas I wore out are 2.1" wide and the ones you guys recommended are a few hundredths to a tenth of an inch wider. My guy feeling is that little bit of difference shouldn't matter, but I have rim brakes (internet says the V3 has V brakes?), so I don't know what I can get away with. I guess if I get them mounted right, it shouldn't matter.


4MUL8R, thanks for the link. They didn't have anything in my size for a price I was willing to pay.

I'm running Schwalbe Land Cruiser tires with Bontrager tubes on a modified Specialized Rockhopper for rides similar to what you are describing - a mix of pavement, gravel roads, bike paths, and two-track trails. The Schwalbes roll nicely on tarmac but have enough tread for stability and traction on dirt. I don't ride in deep sand, but I think they would be good for that as well.

quote:

Originally posted by konata88:
On my bikes, I’ve been able to comfortably add about 0.5” wider tires than stock. Maybe easier with disk brakes. Just need to avoid rubbing against frame or shocks.

This is true to a point, but the rim width matters, too.

Realistically, nothing catastrophic is going to happen if you put a slightly-wider-than-stock mountain bike tire on the stock rims on a mountain bike, but if parts have gotten swapped around over time or tire size has crept up or down, it is possible to run into trouble.

A really wide range of tire sizes will fit on any given rim, but if you go WAY TOO narrow (like inner rim width or smaller) or WAY TOO wide (like 3x inner rim width or larger), you have a potentially dangerous situation where the tire bead engagement with the rim is not secure and/or the tire is not stable and may collapse sideways off the rim.

You can find charts of generally acceptable combinations, e.g. this one from Schwalbe (one of the top-tier bike tire makers):

https://www.schwalbe.com/en/reifenmasse



Also note that near the limits of acceptable tire size, the ideal air pressure for a given tire and type of riding may cause stability or bead engagement problems for that tire and rim combo even though a different pressure that is less ideal might be safe.

Good point. Agree.

And btw, I think stock for my bike was 29”x2.1” from which I went to 2.4” and pressure modulation.

Wider was getting too heavy and slow. 2.4” was a balance of speed, effort and traction for the trail types I frequented.

Looking at Schwalbe and Maxxis. I have zero experience with tubeless tires, and it seems like that's what I'm into with a Maxxis. I watched a video and it doesn't seem to terrible to set one up, but the idea of swishing fluid around every few hours for days is a turnoff. Can I just put the fluid in, inflate them and ride to get coverage? If it's a pain, I'll just go with a Schwalbe, I guess.

You can use tubes in tubeless ready tires. You can do either. Tubeless may be harder to repair in the field, even with a tube. But tubeless ready doesn’t preclude use of a tube.

The hard part is selecting the tire you want based on the trail types you’ll ride. Deep knobs are good for sand, for example, but may be a little squirrelly on pavement. Balance the features. BTW, you can get different tread types and width for front and rear wheels.

Ok, thanks!

I think I've narrowed it down to either the Maxxis Ardent Dual Compound or the Schwalbe Marathon Plus. Either of those seems like a decent compromise for my intended uses.

Those are very different tires.

The Schwalbe Marathon Plus is a road bike/city bike tire intended for pavement, gravel, and urban bike paths.

The Maxxis Ardent is a cross country mountain bike tire, a (relatively) light weight, efficient mountain bike tire intended for trail riding on trails that don’t have big traction problems.

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Tubeless/tubeless ready tires do frequently have stiffer/tighter beads that are harder to get over the rim than non-tubeless tires. Depending on the specific tire, it may be difficult or impossible to install without tire levers.

If you decide to try it, you don’t need to swish sealant around for days. Shaking the wheel around for a minute and bouncing it off the floor a few times is usually plenty.

A few other notes:

1. You would need tubeless valve stems. The valve itself is the same as the one on a tube, it just bolts through the valve hole in the rim and doesn’t have a tube attached.

2. You may need new rim tape (tape wrapped around the inner channel of the rim over the spoke holes) to seal everything up.

3. If you don’t have a compressor, it can be difficult to seat the bead - you have to pressurize the tire somewhat while it isn’t actually sealed to get it expand and snap onto the rim. With a compressor you can be lazy about it. With a bike floor pump, if you’re careful to get the bead as close to seated as you can and pump hard it usually isn’t too bad. If all you have is a compact hand pump, you will have to be super fussy about getting the tire as seated as you can and then pump furiously and it may be tough to get it done.

It isn’t cheaper long-term, but once or twice, if you don’t want to buy a compressor you can use a CO2 cartridge inflator to seat the tires.

4. As konata says, you can put a tube in a tubeless tire, and people using tubeless tires frequently carry a spare tube for emergency repairs. There are also a variety of tubeless tire patch kits available (similar to but smaller than car tire patch kits) that work really well for small punctures (better than with cars because you’ve got sealant in the tire).

5. You will see a lot of people fussing with trying to inject sealant through the valve (with the core removed) or other slow, fiddly methods. I think it’s a wasted effort. I get the tire mostly seated with just a little section of bead outside the rim on one side (or grab tire levers and pop a little section of bead off the rim of it’s not a new tire) and just pour sealant straight from the bottle into the tire. Spin the tire so the outside-the-rim part is up so the sealant doesn’t leak out (don’t lay the tire down, either - the bead isn’t seated yet), pop that last bit of bead over the rim, and air up the tire.

——

So why bother?

Well, road bikers like tubeless because it’s lighter (no tube), which makes it more efficient.

It seems a little counter-intuitive, but mountain bikers like tubeless because it handles punctures better (small punctures typically seal immediately by themselves, bigger punctures can be repaired in seconds with a patch kit) and can be run at lower pressures.

Lower pressures? Yep - less efficient, but better traction, especially on rocks. But with a tubed tire, if the pressure is too low and you hit a big rock, the tire can “squish” to the point that the tube gets pinched between the inner surfaces of the tire between the rock and the rim and get a pressure puncture - a “pinch flat” or “snakebite” (because you get two little holes in the tube where it gets squished together, like a fanged snake bite). The tire is usually tough enough to hold up, but the thin tube gets holes and then the tire can’t hold pressure. Doesn’t usually happen with tubeless (although with low pressure you can still damage a rim if something squishes the tire enough to hit the rim, and you can also push a bit of the bead off the rim and “burp” some air out).

I have tubeless tires on my bikes and one of my kids’ bike, and tubed tires on my wife’s bike and my other kids’ bikes, and honestly I don’t think there’s a big difference in how much work it is, but if you’re really comfortable working with tubed tires you may feel like tubeless is a pain until you get some practice with it.

I'm a roadie so I'm running thinner tires, but I've used Continental Gatorskins for years. With the slime innertubes.

Competitive Cyclist was mentioned before. I've done lots of business with them.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
Those are very different tires.

Lol! Well, I truly don't know what I'm doing, so I appreciate all the guidance. I think I'm just going to order some Ikons for front and rear. After watching a few "Which Maxxis is best for you" and some reviews, it seems like those would be a good compromise for my needs. Reasonably fast rolling but still grippy, and really, I think I need more of a cross country tire than a downhill or something. I'll order some tire levers. I ordered a four pack of Kenda tubes for a good price since my wife's bike needs an inner tube so, for simplicity just for now, I'll use some of those when the Ikons arrive. At some point, I'll pull the tubes and try the sealant. I have a small DeWalt compressor a neighbor gave me before we moved, but I have yet to actually use it, so I guess I'll need to get that figured out and make the sealant happen.

There was a video I watched by a UK guy about setting up a mountain bike for urban riding that had a few tips I found helpful. Some of the issues you mentioned with tubeless tires, he suggested these for, or at least one in the rear:

https://us.nukeproof.com/produ...rim-defence-ard-pair

I'm not sure I see myself going up and down stairs anytime soon, but it seems like maybe a helpful thing if you ride hard on tubeless tires.

To the extent that there is such a thing, the "standard" mountain bike tire is a "trail" tire.

XC mountain biking is an endurance race sport. It's off-road on trails, and technical skill on the bike is important, but the focus is biased towards fitness/endurance/athletic performance. Traditional XC races will have ups, downs, and flats, and are physically grueling, but are not usually especially technically challenging.

You can think of XC as "who can ride their bike around a 10 mile easy mountain bike course the fastest."

So XC tires are light and efficient and not designed for difficult trail conditions.

The other extreme is downhill racing, which is "see who can bomb down a hard trail down the mountain the fastest without breaking their bike or falling off and breaking themselves."

So downhill tires are super heavy duty (because you're going downhill for 2 minutes so you don't care about weight and you don't want your tire to explode when you hit a big rock going 40 miles an hour) and have super knobby treads (because when you have to make a sharp turn going stupid fast you don't want to lose traction and slide off the trail into a tree).

"Trail" tires are just kind of normal tires in between the two extremes.

You'll also see "Enduro." Enduro is basically an XC race to the top of a mountain and then a downhill race to the bottom. Enduro tires are not as heavy and knobby as downhill tires, because downhill tires are really punishing to actually pedal up anything (the same being true of downhill bikes in general), but they're heavier than trail tires because they still want to be able to get down as fast as they can.

Realistically, actual athletes push their equipment much harder than the average hobbyist does.

A normal person trying to go down a downhill course fast enough to ruin an XC tire would kill themselves before they did anything to the tire, and XC tires being lighter and more efficient means they're a lot more pleasant to pedal for someone who isn't exercising hours every day.

If you ride frequently in wet or muddy conditions, some XC tires can struggle, but most places, you really don't want to ride in wet or muddy conditions anyway, because riding on most types of trail surfaces when they are wet absolutely wrecks the trail and requires a lot of work to fix.

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Kenda tubes seem just fine to me, I've used them a few times.

As far as the tire inserts for tubeless tires - they are mainly helpful if you are running super low pressure (like 20-25 PSI) for traction on bumpy rocky trails. With super low pressure and big rocks, it's more likely that you'll hit a rock, fully compress the tire, and either damage the rim or punch a hole in the sidewall by squeezing it between the rim and the rock.

If you run "normal" pressure, there's not much to worry about - the risk of rim damage is the same as running a tubed tire at the same pressure and the risk of a flat is lower (harder to pinch flat a tire sidewall than a tube).

So people go tubeless (in part) to run lower pressures where you'd constantly get pinch flats with tubes, but then they start dinging their rims more, so then since there isn't a tube in the way, they stick foam inserts in the tires to keep rocks from squishing their squishy tires and smashing their rims.

Word of warning: tire inserts can be a pain to get over the rim and tire inserts can make installing tires a REAL pain in the ass. You also give up some of the weight savings of losing the tube (or even all of it - some of the inserts are heavier than tubes).

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
Realistically, actual athletes push their equipment much harder than the average hobbyist does.

Yeah, my athlete days are behind me. This is just to try to keep active in a way that won't destroy what's left of my knees. Arguably, I could pick something better for that, but it's going to be biking.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
A normal person trying to go down a downhill course fast enough to ruin an XC tire would kill themselves before they did anything to the tire, and XC tires being lighter and more efficient means they're a lot more pleasant to pedal for someone who isn't exercising hours every day.

So an XC tire is probably a decent choice for me.

quote:

Originally posted by maladat:
If you ride frequently in wet or muddy conditions, some XC tires can struggle, but most places, you really don't want to ride in wet or muddy conditions anyway, because riding on most types of trail surfaces when they are wet absolutely wrecks the trail and requires a lot of work to fix.

Not going to be riding in much mud, most likely. Sonoran Desert may have some on occasion, but I haven't seen anything of note yet. We have fantastic drainage in Gilbert.

I think a general-purpose XC tire or a light trail tire is a great choice for general hobby mountain biking.

I have two sets of wheels for my mountain bike, I used to keep trail tires with a big open knob spacing on one set because I rode a lot of trails with deep, soft dirt and wet patches, and went back and forth on the other set between XC tires for rides on better trails and gravel tires (basically fat, slightly bumpy road bike tires) for riding around town with my kids.

Now that I live somewhere with better trails, I think I have settled on XC on one set of wheels and gravel on the other, at least for as long as I avoid buying a road bike or gravel bike.

The Ikons you last mentioned are a good general-purpose XC tire and the Ardents you mentioned earlier are kind of on the line between XC and trail. The definitions are pretty vague to begin with.

I stressed “general-purpose XC” tire because there are some special-purpose XC tires that are best avoided - like expensive ultra-light race tires (waste of money if you aren’t a serious racer) or slick or semi-slick tires (which are almost road bike tires with bumps along the edges and are for DRY CONDITIONS ONLY on trails with no loose surface - they will hurt you on sand or loose dirt or a damp patch).