Today’s QoW comes from Premium Member Easel Roberts and tags along perfectly with today’s QT and Tech Talk column.
(We really need to replenish our stock of Questions! Please submit you own QoW ideas using the Question of the Week Ideas link.)
Expert road cycling advice, since 2001
Today’s QoW comes from Premium Member Easel Roberts and tags along perfectly with today’s QT and Tech Talk column.
(We really need to replenish our stock of Questions! Please submit you own QoW ideas using the Question of the Week Ideas link.)
I normally replace them both at the same time. I then use the best of the two tires as a spare. I keep the old tires and used to take off the good rear tire and put on one of the old spares when I was using the trainer in the winter-time. Better to wear out the old tire(s) that ruin one with only a few miles on it! My 700×23’s do double duty:
Besides my upright 10-speed triple, I also have a Catrike 700, so I have 20″ tires on the front and a 700×23 on the rear. I carry one spare tire with me at all times, along with a boot, paper money, and also two spare tubes of each size. With a trike, you can get away with carrying that much extra stuff.
For my upright, I carry two tubes and one spare tire at all times, along with 3 CO2 bottles. Those extra tubes have come in handy more than once, and so have the extra CO2 bottles. I’m not into worrying so much about my average speed, so I don’t care about the extra weight. I do care about not having to either push the bike home or having to make a phone call for someone to come and get me because I don’t have spare tube(s) or tire for replacement. I’d rather lose a mile per hour in average speed, ha.
I used to replace the rear and leave the front because it seemed like the front lasted as long as two rears. Recently I went to putting a 25mm on the rear and a 23mm on the front – now they seem to wear about the same so they get replaced together. The 25’s seem to last longer. For the past 15 years I have almost exclusively used Continental 4000 – Grand Prix or “S” .
Because the rear tire wears twice as fast as the front, I rotate the front tire to the rear wheel and install a new tire on the front. So with the better tire on the front I have better control of the steering and a better chance of staying upright should something happen.