Slick tires on hybrid

[Bristolspitfire]

hello all, very new here so please take it easy on me...

I bought a trek soho 2007 off ebay two years ago, hybrid bike, was great for getting me into cycling. I use it for riding with the family with my little one on the back in a bike seat, and for trying to get fitness in, max ride so far prob 60miles.

Ive commited to the ms150 in massachusetts in june ao i need to start training. At the same time i went for a ride yesterday and got a flat. As im going to be riding more, instead of replacing tube myself i brought it to bike shop. wanted them to go through it. I needed tires as well so im thinking about smooth ass road tires, keeping on the 700x32 size my hybrid wheels require.

By my usage and goals of the bike, does anyone think these tires would be an issue? Mainly worried bout losing grip while little one is on the back.

Thank you thank you thank you!

 

[dabac]

The reason that (road-use) car tires have treads is to allow water to escape. Car tires present a flat front and tries to push water ahead of them. At some combination of speed/depth/tread depth the water can no longer escape, some gets squasher in under the tire and you begin to aquaplane.
Bicycle wheels, being much narrower, doesn't have this problem, and can't aquaplane under realistic conditions.
So for road use slick tires can provide more grip since there's more rubber meeting the road.
And while you do need to match the 700C diameter, you don't have to match the 32. Might want to hang onto it in the rear, for the carrying capacity, but otherwise a slightly smaller like a 28 should fit just fine.

 

[Froze]

Conti makes several tires in various price ranges and flat protection levels that are all smooth tread. Bontrager has a good selection of smooth tires in there Hardcase series; Specialized Nimbus series; Panasonic Panaracer Gravel; Jack Brown tire only found at Rivendell that I know of.

 

[alfeng]

ALSO ...

This may-or-may-not be stating the obvious, but you will probably need a different size inner tube when installing different size tires ...

Also worth noting, the bead-to-bead dimension AND/OR the brake surface difference may create a limit to how narrow the tire can be realistically mounted on some rims ...

So, while I know someone who used to mount 700x32 tires on 622-15 rims (where "15" is the bead-to-bead dimension), a better rim size for that size tire would generally be 622-17 or even 622-19 ...

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In other words, mounting narrower tires on wide rims can be problematic at times.

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[Froze]

If you measure your interior rim with, meaning from inside of the lip to the other side of the lip you can usually put as many as 6 different size tires on a rim. For example if you measure your rim and you come up with 17mm (I use this as an example only but if your bike came with 700x32 tires from the factory, which I'm pretty sure they did, then it's a real good chance your rim is 17mm wide, but measure to make sure), then you can use any tire from a 700x25 to a 700x37 (some 38's are actually closer to 37 so a good chance they will fit), (in this case with a 17mm wide rim you have 5 choices of tire sizes).