Consumables
After a couple of years of riding them until they basically disintegrated, I have finally gone through all of my 26×700c Nashbar Duro tires. After the rear tire started going flat every 10 miles (and when I pulled it from the rim it was tissue thin on the puncture surface) and the front tire followed in quick succession (also tissue thin, but loaded with shards of glass) I scrounged through my tire bin and retrieved the last two Duro tires that are roadworthy (for suitably relaxed definitions of “roadworthy” – the one on the back has been booted after getting a huge tear in the puncture surface, and the one is the front is gashed into oblivion, plus is worn dangerously close to tissue thin.)
And, of course, Nashbar doesn’t make them anymore, because 26mm tires are apparently balloon tires now and no respectable roadie would be found dead using tires that won’t cause deep gashes in your hands if you pick your bicycle up by the wheels. So I have to look for other tires (I do have a pair of Parigi-Roubaix tires sitting in the basement, but I’m waiting for summertime before I use them because they are, um, somewhat flat-prone and I’d rather be fixing a flat when it’s not pouring down icy rain) that will do the job for me.
It would be lovely if I could get the wear that I got out of the Duros – the last pair lasted somewhat over 5000 miles, including about 300 miles of gravel and otherwise non-improved surfaces – but I’ll be happy to get my price/100 miles down to under $1 so it won’t feel like my regular routine of riding is throwing money at a bicycle-shaped hole in the sky.
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On the MLCM I’m trying to keep ≤ 28mm tires (with the single exception, at least as long as they last, of the Parigi-Roubaix tires) so the only Marathon that’s usable is the 28. The Duranos have a good reputation, except that a lot of people claim that they’re really hard to get on and off a rim and I’m not sure if I want the opportunity to be fighting that much with tires 30 hours into a R600 (I had this happen last year, and even with the easyish-to-remove Duros it proved to be more of a puzzle than disenflatifying a tire usually is.)
Too bad they’re so expensive, too :-(
The difficult-to-remove thing seems to be highly variable; a friend of mine has 26" wheels and 650B Marathon Pluses (or possibly the other way around; the core point being the tires are just slightly small for the rim) and I can’t get those off the rim. (Or, more precisely, the one time I was considering to do this for truing purposes I gave it a try and decided it wasn’t worth the likely time and effort. I’m pretty sure I could have eventually removed them, but I might have expended some tyre levers to do it…) But she rides way more than I do (though less than you do) and hasn’t yes flatted on those wheels ever either, and Toronto’s streets are get shiny with glass in the summer.
My 28-622 Marathon Pluses on Velocity Dyad 700C rims are a doodle to remove; take the air out, stick a tyre lever under the bead to get it started, stick a quick stick or another lever under and pull in a circle. It’s not free of effort but it’s not hard to do and replacing them isn’t any harder. (though I may be a bit heterodox in preferring to sink the rim in the tyre, with tyre on both sides of the rim and the inner tube completely trapped, before setting out to tuck the bead back in the bead seats.)
I suspect that it’s kinda like the time where there were three sizes of quarter inch bolts loose in the world; actual quarter inch bolts, 6.5mm bolts labeled as quarter inch bolts, and 6.35mm bolts that were a different thread pitch than the quarter inch bolts, none of which played well together and all of which were sometimes found together in the same bin. If the rim and tyre disagree just that little bit, as could easily be the case if the tyre’s really metric and the rim is really imperial, I suspect that’s when the removal gets bad. No idea how you could possibly test this ahead of time, though.
(Note that there are like 11 flavours of marathons; I suggested the supremes because they’re on the fast end for what’s primarily meant to be an indestructible touring tire. But various of the other flavours come in 28-622.)
And, yeah, they are expensive. The ones I’ve got have been excellent value, though, and I’m Canadian enough to think that it’s the value that matters more than the price. :)
The best price I’ve found for a Marathon Plus is about $45. And they're580 grams (for 25×700c)? That’s an awful lot of rubber; I’d hate to spend $90 for a set and discover than they ride like india rubber bricks.
Rubber and a couple belts of anti-puncture material in the case of the pluses (that’s what “plus” means in Schwalbe-speak; there’s an anti-puncture belt in back of the tread rubber made out of something that isn’t tread rubber) but the rule that avoiding flats requires rubber mass holds, I think, despite some of it being high-tech not-technically-rubber.
Marathon Pluses are not going to be as fast as a road tyre; they’re touring tires, and optimized for not having to fix flats when you’ve got a hundred extra pounds of stuff slung round the bike. They’re by no means awful but I certainly don’t find mine especially fast. (One of the reasons to put a set of Supremes on the town wheels is to see just what the difference was per little brick in the Schwalbe charts for speed.)
I find them a comfortable ride on pavement but mine are being run at roughly 7 bar (90 psi front, 100 PSI rear), I weigh about 250 lbs, and they do transmit shock from discontinuous surfaces of which there are plenty on the local roads. (Town bike got spec’d for 40mm tyres for this reason, but on anything decently smooth they’re fine; it’s the places where there’s a 2-inch drop across the trolley tracks or equivalent that present problems.) I don’t try loose gravelly surfaces because 300+ pounds of self, bike, water, etc. even without the touring bags on 28-622 makes that a bad plan. Stone dust has been fine; the rather wretched decaying bricks run up to the lighthouse at Tommy Thompson (whole place is fill; think of cobblestones produced from housing bricks and random chunks of concrete by erosion and having bulldozers run over them) is a bit jouncy but doable sitting. I really do believe the flatless part; I’ve ridden over fresh shattered windshield glass in wee shiny cubes while fully loaded (the alternative being to ride in front of a truck) and not only did they not flat, none of the glass stuck. So the tradeoff is real; many many fewer flats for the mass.
The fastest flat-proof-category tyre Schwalbe’ve got is the Marathon Racer HS429; those don’t get narrower than 30-622, though. Those list at 48.35 USD and 395 grams.
Marathon Supremes come in 28-622, list at 79.85 in that size, are 310 grams, are nigh as fast and asserted very good in the wet. (Something I will have an opinion about in a month or so, but mine aren’t here yet.)
Straight-up Marathons with no adjectives come in 25-622 (as well as 28-622), list at 41.95, and 520 grams. (Much less high-tech in the composition; these have 3mm of latex anti-puncture belt.)
http://www.schwalbetires.com/product_search lets you find every tire in a size they make; you then have to figure out what it’s called, rather than its part number, but you get all the other information so that might be helpful. There’s a boatload of non-flat-proof, much cheaper, tyres in sizes like 25-622.
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I’m currently in the process of switching from 28 to 35 mm tyres, in the hope of being easier on the rims and rolling a bit better. (I figure the tyres are NOT the dominant component of wind resistance, even neglecting me; once there are fenders and a front bag it’s not going to matter very much how wide the tyres are. Fenders, a front bag, a rear bag, and all four panniers? Pfft.)
I’ve been using Schwalbe Marathon Pluses in 28-622, which so far as I can tell don’t flat (they certainly haven’t for me) and 2011’s 1,600 km hasn’t got the mold line off completely off them yet with something like 140kg standard load, but they’re a bit slow. (So am I, and I’m not doing anything timed, so this hardly matters. :)
Marathon Supremes come in 28-622, and are ostensibly pretty decent for your purposes. They certainly have a reputation for being hard to flat and for grip in the wet, and while they’re not cheap your $1/100 mile metric is probably achievable; lots of people report getting 10 kmiles out of Marathons generally. (These are going on the new town wheels in 35; duremes going on the touring wheels, also in 622-35. Not sure if I’ve managed to kill the original wheelset rims or not, but not wanting to suppose I haven’t.)
Durano racing tyres come in 28-622, and Schwalbe claims that you should be able to expect 10,000 km from them.
http://www.schwalbetires.com/bike_tires/road_tires/marathon_supreme
http://www.schwalbetires.com/bike_tires/racing_tires/durano