eCue said:
Amberwolf , I am sorry you dont feel the same about high psi , its Uber important if your concerned with battery life ? Anyhow how low rr tires work is they need the high psi in them if you want to gain the low rr (rolling resistance) they have built in .
The tires roll SO much better with high psi amazingly so.
They also bounce like basket balls on bad roads when there's insufficient load, and have less grip on the road, because of the smaller contact patch.
It's not a matter of how I feel about high PSI. It's a matter of how things work under different loads. If you don't have much of a load on a highly-inflated tire, the contact patch area isn't compressed down and not as much of it touches the road.
The simplest way to deal with the problems these things cause is to only inflate them to higher pressures when you are carrying a higher load. Some tires have the recommendations molded into the sidewall. If you take a look at the manual for a car, trailer, truck, etc., you may find a chart in there for inflation pressures at different loads. You might also find these charts on automotive tire manufacturer or seller sites. They may call it a "Load and Inflation Table". Some bicycle tire manufacturers might also still do this, but I haven't looked recently to see.
A different way to get lower rolling resistance is to use larger diameter wheels, which will also have more air volume in them to absorb road problems vs the smaller ones of the same width.
You don't *have* to ride on rock-hard tires and beat up wheels (and you and cargo) to get good rolling resistance.
OT:
If you have smooth roads to ride on, you don't have to worry about that, but unfortunately here in Phoenix the desert heat in summer softens the asphalt, and then the heavy traffic on the roads (especially buses and SUVs) that stops and starts frequently pushes the asphalt around, so it makes "waves" and troughs in the surface, sometimes inches high or deep. Sometimes these are gradual (occuring over several feet), more often they are sudden (over just inches or less). Once they reach some critical point that changes with how the last repair or resurfacing was done, the asphalt breaks off and leaves a sharp-edged hole there, the depth of which can be an inch or two to several inches (on rare occasions enough to bury a 20" wheel to it's axle).
This damage doesn't get repaired very often, because its' mostly at the edges of the road or lane, and cars mostly don't have to encounter them--and even when they do, they have suspension and tires and wheels designed to deal with this stuff without breaking, and msotly wihtout the occupants even feeling most of it.
It's enough to sometimes crash bicyclists (sometimes from broken wheels), who are forced to ride over those areas, or else get on teh sidewalk, which can be just as bad in some places, where blocks have been lifted up to do utility maintenance, and not set back down correctly so they have inch to several inch vertical level changes between the blocks. Or the dirt not put back in the hole afterward so the blocks settle down into a down/up ramp with a bottom that can be inches below the rest of the sidewalk (these aren't as big a deal for breaking things, but they can be quite a surprise).
Or the blocks aren't put back at all, so there's just a hole there. At least you can *see* those before you get to them, even in poor lighting, due to the large color difference, but you often can't really see the block level changes if they're still there, even in daytime, until you're practically on top of them--and you can't swerve around them, cuz there's nowhere to go but the street full of traffic and it's road edge problems.
These problems aren't a big deal on back streets--those just have crumbling and cracked asphalt and sidewalks for problems, wherever there are problems. But on any main or half mile street (where the bike lanes usually are, and where everybody has to ride at some point to get where they're going), these are common problems.
The good thing is we don't have an icy winter season (especially with salting the roads) to exacerbate these problems like a lot of northern cities do.
I have been riding with them for years and years, They are my go to and favorite choice in tire so when I seen the 16 inch hookworm I jumped at the chance to put them on the trailer what a SCORE !
I've used the hookworms (and ringworms) in 20", because they have good road grip (though the softer compound necessary for this makes them wear out much faster than tires with poorer grip), and are relatively "fat" so they have more air volume for better bump absorption, but they're insufficient for my purposes, with very heavy (hundreds of pounds) loads on poor to bad roads with potholes, bumps, and "waves" in the asphalt that can be several inches high, as noted above.
Never thought they made the hook worms in 16 inch size.
One thing to look at is which version they are. They make (or at least used to make) single ply and multi ply versions of the tire, and the multi ply will last longer especially under high loads (but it probably costs more). Unfortunately AFAICT the 20" hasn't been available in the multi ply in years so I've never been able to try it out--all the ones I've had were single-ply. I don't know if the 16" is or not. I think the 24" and/or 26" might still be.
They still last longer than other 20" tires I've used, but at the price they don't last long enough, which is another reason I went to the Shinko moped tires for SB Cruiser (in addition to air volume/bump absorption/ride quality for that size tire, flat resistance, grip, and something else I cant' remember ATM).
If you're interested in the pluses and minuses of various tire qualities, there's a number of threads a search of "tire*" in the title will find, that have discussions about that with good (and bad) information in them.