Re: Folding tyres for MTBs

Simon Brooke

in message <domaindomain.1hl1gy@no-mx.forums.cyclingforums.com>,
domaindomain ('domaindomain.1hl1gy@no-mx.forums.cyclingforums.com')
wrote:

> Hi All, does anyone have any experience of Conti Twister Pros - the
> ones that fold up!

I haven't use those. I have, however, used Hutchinson Scorpion
Airlights, and thought them totally useless for Scottish conditions.

It's not the Kevlar bead that makes the difference. The Airlights were
built with a very lightweight carcase (which does help with folding)
and a tread pattern which looked quite pretty but gripped nothing.

Off road tyres get much more intimate with much rougher surfaces and
many more thorns than road tyres ever have to face. An
ultra-lightweight carcase is not a good idea in my opinion. Beyond
that, the first and most important thing is to get a tread pattern
which will grip on your local combination of surfaces without being too
slow.

Which raises the other issue. If you're getting excited about folding
tyres it's presumably because you want to take a spare with you on a
ride, but there are very few tread designs which are good for both
front and rear wheels, unless your local surfaces are mostly very firm.

My personal choice for around here - mixture of mud, gravel, loose
forest litter, and a certain amount of bare rock[1] - are WTB
Velociraptors, which are available with Kevlar bead, but the front and
back are very different.



[1] They're not good on wet bare rock, but they're sufficiently good on
the other surfaces that I forgive them

--
simon@jasmine.org.uk (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/

;; not so much a refugee from reality, more a bogus
;; asylum seeker