Puncture Already?! Looking at Tyre options. Advice?

[Suspekt1]

So Guys I have only been riding my new Bike less than a week and have already gotten a flat on the back (Hub Motor Wheel) and haven't been riding it excessively or anything
Now because my Hub is wired into a 26 inch Wheel I don't have the option of going up to Motorbike wheels & Tyres.

So that this doesn't happen again im looking at:
Tannus Thoroki Solid tyres - These look amazing.. anyone have experience with them?
or
Shwalbe Marathon Plus Tyres - these seem to be the standard anti puncture tyre?

im leaning towards the solid tyres.. one week and the tyres flat hmm

 

[Keith Pegg]

I have hookworm tires and thorn tubes with tire goop inside 2oz. I have not had a flat in two years and only add air every 6 months.

 

[amberwolf]

THere's a "few" threads that have good info. One possible search below
https://endless-sphere.com/forums/search.php?keywords=flat+&terms=all&author=&sc=1&sf=titleonly&sk=t&sd=d&sr=topics&st=0&ch=300&t=0&submit=Search
should be fairly obvious which threads are relevant (not all are).

Other search terms will bring up different lists of relevant threads.

 

[Suspekt1]

Thanks Amberwolf ill have a read... I did search for Punctures but I think the issue might be to do with the tube... Theres no marks where something has Punctured the tyre... for now ill be buying a new tube and investigating the situation of the old tube.. maybe high speed hitting a curb or something caused it. :?

 

[Chalo]

Keep adequate pressure in the tire, and check it frequently. If the tire is original to the bike, and the bike cost less than about 500 dollars new, it's probably a pretty crappy tire. And if the tire came with the hub motor wheel, it's almost guaranteed to be garbage.

You don't have to immediately jump to the heaviest, slowest tire you can find just because you got a flat. These things happen. Maybe try a reasonably good quality tire first?

I like Panaracer RiBMo very well. For me it has resisted punctures just as well as Schwalbe Marathon Plus, but it's faster, cheaper, lighter, and has a nicer ride quality. I'd also go for Big Apple Plus before Marathon Plus, because it rides better while still having robust protection.

WTB Thick Slick Deluxe and Thick Slick Flat Guard are good, comparatively fast armored tires that come in 26 x 2.0 size.

 

[dogman dan]

Better tube, the thick kind, could be all you really need. Thick tube and lots of slime or stans if you have lots of long thorns in the area, or small nail punctures.

 

[zackclark70]

i use shwalbe kevlar tyers they last ages and very rare to get punctures they make them in both road and offroad in the winter i use ice tyers with the metal spikes

 

[t_tberg]

All of these tire discussions seem to fail to mention the importance of a proper tire/rim combination.

maybe high speed hitting a curb or something caused it. :?

It sounds like you got a pinch flat, a wider rim would help mitigate this issue, not to mention the better ride quality. If your frame has the clearance, many other users including myself have had success with the hookworm and Alex DX32. That is not to say that it is bulletproof, I had a extremely tiny sliver of metal that caused the tire to slowly leak out leaving me with a surprise flat after an 8 hour shift.

 

[Suspekt1]

I have the Alex Rim DM24 on front and back... and now you mention the tiny sliver of metal, I could agree this could have been the case.. I have been doing work in the garage lately.. could have been some bit of debris
I swapped to a new tube and have had no issues yet... the hole in the old tube was like a pin hole almost too small to see but enough to get the air down overnight etc...
so far I do like the tyres I already have but if this looks like a regular issue I will look into thicker tubes and different tyres... fitting the new tube was really easy with the quick connector on my motor just unclipped and removed the wheel without hassle. thanks for your input though guys i'm still looking into whether to try the solid tyres... my thinking is with my dual suspension surely I wouldn't notice the harder ride that much?

 

[Chalo]

i'm still looking into whether to try the solid tyres... my thinking is with my dual suspension surely I wouldn't notice the harder ride that much?

Foam tires will quickly beat your wheels apart. They apply loads only to the section of rim directly over the contact patch, not all the way around like a pneumatic tire. If it were that easy, you'd see them all over the place. Don't be fooled.

 

[neptronix]

I cut a schwalbe marathon plus apart to find out what was good/bad with it --v

https://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=89469

It's a pretty good tire, but is not as thick or bulletproof as i like. The key is to keep it SUPER inflated because the outer ends of the tire are almost as vulnerable as any other tire.

I have not found a thicker bicycle tire... and trust me, i've looked. I live in goathead and metal scrap on the road hell.

I was at the used bike parts shop the other day and checked the amount of rubber on other tires. Your average bike tire has 2-3mm at it's weakest points. Some tires were 4mm thick at the strongest points. I have no idea why bicycle tires are constructed this way.

A light hub motor won't help.. i went from a 16lb hub to a 8.5lb hub and seem to get flats with the same frequency. Of course, the flats are still on the rar usually, where most of the body weight of a rider sits ( i'm 175lbs at the moment, so not terribly heavy.. )

I have not tried anti flat sealants just yet, but have been told by several locals that they're the way to go.

 

[Chalo]

I was at the used bike parts shop the other day and checked the amount of rubber on other tires. Your average bike tire has 2-3mm at it's weakest points. Some tires were 4mm thick at the strongest points. I have no idea why bicycle tires are constructed this way.

It's because squishing rubber takes energy. You can observe it yourself, just stretching and releasing a big rubber band, that you're making heat. On a pedal bike, you only have one motor available, and it only makes as much power as it does. You have to make the available power work for you, and not needlessly waste it squishing rubber. You don't usually ride on the tires' sidewalls, but you flex them whenever the bike is rolling. That's why most good tires have very little rubber on the sidewalls.

Thickness is only one means of defense against punctures. Textile belts can offer more protection with less added weight and rolling resistance, compared to just adding rubber.

Goatheads are a special kind of hazard. They're so fine-pointed that they can sneak past almost any protective belt as long as the tire thickness doesn't exceed the length of the spines. On the other hand, they make the teeny-tiniest kind of holes that are very easy to block up with sealant. So the long-term winning strategies in goathead lands seem to be two:

One, add thickness. Schwalbe Marathon Plus is one way to do this. Another way is "the system", which involves lining your tire with another tire that has had the bead wires cut off. For best results, the inside tire is a size smaller than the outer tire and has the smoothest available tread.

Two, use sealant. Slime is the old standby, but newer bicycle-specific concoctions like Stan's and Orange Seal have earned a loyal following.

I had an online friend from Pueblo, CO who would use Slime in his normal road bike tires with normal thickness tubes, adding air as necessary until the punctures grew so numerous that the tires leaked down too quickly. He frequently updated a log of rides and repairs at rec.bicycles.tech. As I recall, a typical puncture count by the time he got around to swapping the tube was at least 70, identifiable by little green dots that appeared when the tube was inflated.

Here in The Live Music Capital of Texas, where you have to earn goatheads by riding in untrampled grass during the summer, Slime is usually more trouble than it is worth. Hazards in my neighborhood tend towards construction debris, broken bottles, and auto glass from crashes and break-ins. Slime often fails to seal up the resulting punctures, but it never fails to make a mess of the air valve and whatever part of the tube you need to patch. Eventually, it turns into dreadlocks in green sauce inside the tube, whether it ever successfully plugged up a leak or not. (Stan's turns into cheese curds instead of dreadlocks, but it does so more quickly.)

 

[motomech]

The Forte Gotham is a decent low-cost copy of the Schwalbe Marathon Plus.
They an extra thick tube as well.

 

[neptronix]

It's because squishing rubber takes energy. You can observe it yourself, just stretching and releasing a big rubber band, that you're making heat. On a pedal bike, you only have one motor available, and it only makes as much power as it does. You have to make the available power work for you, and not needlessly waste it squishing rubber. You don't usually ride on the tires' sidewalls, but you flex them whenever the bike is rolling. That's why most good tires have very little rubber on the sidewalls.

Yeah, but what's pedaling efficiency worth when it's a few MM of rubber between you and having to get off the bike and spending 5 minutes and 5-10 bucks replacing a tube? it seems to be a net negative once you consider money and time. With how often i flat, and how few miles i travel, i think that my bicycle might actually be more expensive to operate per mile than my car.

I'd rather pedal a bit harder and have less to worry about, but i guess no manufacturers and are thinking the same way, and consumers and bike shops aren't putting the market pressure on. The tire i am looking for just doesn't exist.

People see bicycles as recreational vehicles here, and not something to commute on. There is only one bike shop in salt lake city county ( 2 million people ) i've found that sells seriously puncture proof tires. Most stores don't stock a single one. At the service area of every bike store, i see that most of the repairs are for flat tires, not much else.

Chicken and egg problem? i wonder how many people stop riding a bicycle shortly after buying one because they're tired of all the hassle.. i wish i had the means to contract a tire manufacturer to make a clone of the Cheng Shin/CST C121.. Cheng Shin America will not respond to phone calls or emails at all.

Goatheads are a special kind of hazard. They're so fine-pointed that they can sneak past almost any protective belt as long as the tire thickness doesn't exceed the length of the spines. On the other hand, they make the teeny-tiniest kind of holes that are very easy to block up with sealant. So the long-term winning strategies in goathead lands seem to be two:

That's exactly what i've noticed. Doesn't matter whether you use kevlar or any other fancy protective layer.. it all comes down to thickness. The goatheads are almost as strong as metal.

10mm+ thick tires would sort this out in short order.

I had an online friend from Pueblo, CO who would use Slime in his normal road bike tires with normal thickness tubes, adding air as necessary until the punctures grew so numerous that the tires leaked down too quickly. He frequently updated a log of rides and repairs at rec.bicycles.tech. As I recall, a typical puncture count by the time he got around to swapping the tube was at least 70, identifiable by little green dots that appeared when the tube was inflated.

Now there's a man i want to talk to. I wonder what he is using today or if he is even riding. Offroad, i can pick up 100+ goatheads in a single ride in Utah. It's insane. Slime would certainly help but it is no permanent fix.

Here in The Live Music Capital of Texas, where you have to earn goatheads by riding in untrampled grass during the summer, Slime is usually more trouble than it is worth. Hazards in my neighborhood tend towards construction debris, broken bottles, and auto glass from crashes and break-ins. Slime often fails to seal up the resulting punctures, but it never fails to make a mess of the air valve and whatever part of the tube you need to patch. Eventually, it turns into dreadlocks in green sauce inside the tube, whether it ever successfully plugged up a leak or not. (Stan's turns into cheese curds instead of dreadlocks, but it does so more quickly.)

It seems like they don't clean the streets here often. Various metal pieces from cars are strewn everywhere.
Slime and stans sound like a real annoyance.. i recently bought an extra thick tube and put a sealant in it the first time.. I don't trust the idea.. i don't like the idea.. but i'm desperate now.

 

[2old]

FME, but we don't have nearly the goatheads others experience, Stan's works best tubeless. Biggest problems in really hot areas is that it would need to be refreshed every two months. I've seen a tire with 100 types of thorns, nails etc holding air with Stan's tubeless. PITA to work with, but beats flats on the road AFAICT.

 

[amberwolf]

Yeah, but what's pedaling efficiency worth when it's a few MM of rubber between you and having to get off the bike and spending 5 minutes and 5-10 bucks replacing a tube? it seems to be a net negative once you consider money and time. With how often i flat, and how few miles i travel, i think that my bicycle might actually be more expensive to operate per mile than my car.

That's a big part of why I went with the Shinko MC/moped tires (and tubes) on those 20" rear wheels (smoothing out the ride was another, with no rear suspension). The only problem I have had so far appears to ahve been caused by a possible pinch due to a huge piece of metal debris (piece of car frame? dunno) I couldn't avoid on the trike, made worse by a subsequent big pothole strike, IIRC. I was afraid it might be valve stem damage (where it is bonded to the tube) but didn't seem to be the case. But I added regular bike Slime to it, and it's been fine since then (though I still need to get a pair of new tubes, just in case).

Before I did that I was having fairly frequent problems with flats, even with the tire-inside-a-tire trick. :/ (even given that the tires I was using were mostly garbage, I didn't expect that bad a problem with my previous experiences with them).

FWIW, before I fixed it with Slime, I could let the Shinko get down to 10PSI or less and it'd still roll along witout crushing the sidewalls. If I tried that on a bicycle tire it'd've probably destroyed the tire and the tube. I recall when I first installed the tires I hadn't aired them up at all yet and it still held the trike up (not with me on it) without flattening the sidewalls. The bike tires certainly weren't like that.

But there is a definite efficiency hit--it doesn't greatly affect me since I have a big battery and motors, but it's there, and does waste power and create heat I wouldn't have with the other tires--but I need the reliability more than I need the efficiency.

I'd rather pedal a bit harder and have less to worry about, but i guess no manufacturers and are thinking the same way, and consumers and bike shops aren't putting the market pressure on. The tire i am looking for just doesn't exist.

Maybe not in bicycle stuff...but if you're riding 20" bicycle wheels, there's (relatively) light moped / mc tires that would probably do it, in the 2" or 2.5" widths, 16" diameter.

Now there's a man i want to talk to. I wonder what he is using today or if he is even riding. Offroad, i can pick up 100+ goatheads in a single ride in Utah. It's insane. Slime would certainly help but it is no permanent fix.

Used to have that problem when I rode my regular bike on the canal paths years back, and is why I ended up using both slime and their protector strips--but even that didnt' stop everything, so I spent a lot of time on rides re-airing up the tires with a hand pump. The slime did seal the holes, just that there were so MANY of them.

I tried the solid foam tubes, and they sucked; beat up the wheels in back (destroyed at least one I recall), and destroyed tires in front (actually coming off the rim in turns could happen too). I'm sure there's better ones these days, but I much prefer air in there....

Slime and stans sound like a real annoyance.. i recently bought an extra thick tube and put a sealant in it the first time.. I don't trust the idea.. i don't like the idea.. but i'm desperate now.

The armor that I used on regular bikes (and so far successfully on Yogi's trailer) is a regular tire, then another tire minus bead inside that, then a slime protector strip, then an old thick tube sliced circumferentially with valve stem removed, then a thick tube actually being used, with slime in it.

Heavier bikes, like my cargo bikes, that didn't always work on, but it was way better than anything else I'd tried.


But anything the slime wouldn't seal, I'd have to patch, and that was a huge PITA to first get teh tube out of the layers, and then to clean the slime off (had to carry a kit of stuff just to do that!), then patch it, then put it all back together and then re-air it up. :/

I'd much rather live with the rolling resistance of the tires/tubes that keep me from having to do that in the first place.

 

[neptronix]

The armor that I used on regular bikes (and so far successfully on Yogi's trailer) is a regular tire, then another tire minus bead inside that, then a slime protector strip, then an old thick tube sliced circumferentially with valve stem removed, then a thick tube actually being used, with slime in it.

...

I'd much rather live with the rolling resistance of the tires/tubes that keep me from having to do that in the first place.

Holy ************, AW, you've been through the ringer and tried everything. It sounds like Phoenix is just as bad as here.

Thank you for your wisdom.
I suppose i'm barking up the right tree by also switching to motorcycle tires.

 

[amberwolf]

Just still keep a good pump and patch kit (or slime/etc or spare tube) with you, cuz it's still possible to get flats even with those; nothing pneumatic is invulnerable.

Though...if you get ones with thick enough sidewalls you might be able to ride slowly even with a near-flat. But I expect the sidewall thickness increase will decrease the suspension effectiveness of the tire itself. And remember the efficiency hit you'll take with them.

Also...MC/moped tires seem to be cheaper than bicycle tires for the same relative quality, though I haven't looked around a whole lot to compare them. Tubes seem about the same (but the standard MC tubes I've seen so far are as thick or thicker than the "thick" BC tubes...I expect the "thick" MC tubes are like BC *tires*!).


We don't seem to have quite the GH problem y'all do there, at least not in the city, but there's plenty of other debris on the roads, especially from construction trucks. Sometimes a bucket of nails/etc falls off of one and scatters all over the road; back on the old DayGlo Avenger bike, I recall such a spill where I avoided most nails, and the slime protector strips saved me from the rest--except for one that went all the way thru tire, strip, tube, back of tube, and at least a bit into rim; enough to leave a mark. But Slime company sent me new strips and tubes when I let them know about that (I forget exactly what they said, that it must've been a bad batch or something? I didn't believe that, having figured out that the strips can only work when conditions are just right upon debris entry--which is most of the time, but sometimes a perfectly perpendicular puncture perpetrates itself upon the tire, and POP. :/ )

I havent' seen that sort of thing all that often, but there's still the odd nail here and there, and I prefer to avoid riding over the cracks that are large enough for such things to be hiding in them with the tips sticking out waiting for a bike tire to come along.

The edges of teh road are usually a lot worse than the parts the cars are on, so I avoid those too, and generally try to stay where tires of larger vehicles have already cleared my path.

On bicycle-lanes that doesn't work, but the roads with those on them are typically less junked-up than the roads without them (more primary streets with more big traffic).

 

[John in CR]

Once you get tired of fixing flats on ridiculously expensive bicycle tires, fix your ebike up with DOT approved motorcycle or moped tires. Unless you're forces to carry your ebike around or spend a lot of time in the air, a few kilos of proper tires is well worth the headache savings. You don't even have to put air in them nearly as often. You have a motor now, other than the anemic 200W or so human motor which costs far more to power that cyclists are stuck with slow at the side of the road.

I haven't had a flat this decade, and the one I had since the switch still enabled me to ride home on the flat before removing the screw and patching the tube.

 

[rojitor]

Good tires+tire liners+anti-puncture gel did a great service to me. I only had a flat once. This pin is to blame:

I still keep this little mf. It destroyed everything. Got inside in full length. Nothing could survive a pin this big.

 

[Chalo]

You have a motor now, other than the anemic 200W or so human motor which costs far more to power that cyclists are stuck with slow at the side of the road.

Sure... say, why not just put your e-bike into a little truck and drive the truck around, since there's no need to be energy-efficient? Heck, get a big truck and use it to carry the smaller truck with the e-bike in it. After all, you have a motor now.

Once you give up on the folly of using only enough speed, energy, and vehicle to do the job, you can hurry along past all those slow anemic cyclists and meet other wise, empowered motorists in the same place.

 

[neptronix]

Once you give up on the folly of using only enough speed, energy, and vehicle to do the job, you can hurry along past all those slow anemic cyclists and meet other wise, empowered motorists in the same place.

 

[DRMousseau]

Good tires+tire liners+anti-puncture gel did a great service to me. I only had a flat once. This pin is to blame:

I still keep this little mf. It destroyed everything. Got inside in full length. Nothing could survive a pin this big.

Haven't had a flat in 18months!!! But jus last week, I found a big construction staple, like that pin, bent in the middle, but with legs on each end,.... heard it tickin' and stopped right away. Made it way right thru the tread and out again at the sidewall margin of the Big Apple!!! Didn't damage the underlying cords, jus punched a hole in and punch itself out, "lacing" itself thru the tread rubber.

Thinkin' the chisel points of the staple and full tire pressures deflected it's penetration. I was lucky,.... jus a heavy Schwabb tube inside that I haven't "slimed" yet, and the staple didn't "RIP" the tread.

Hate rear flats,... more now than ever!!!

 

[rojitor]

Yes. Rear flats are the worst. I was one hour late for work that day. Also tired and sweating. I had a brand new hookworm but as I said Nothing could survive that pin. Even the rim got scratched.

 

[Chalo]

I found a big construction staple, like that pin, bent in the middle, but with legs on each end,.... heard it tickin' and stopped right away. Made it way right thru the tread and out again at the sidewall margin of the Big Apple!!! Didn't damage the underlying cords, jus punched a hole in and punch itself out, "lacing" itself thru the tread rubber.

That's the work of the Kevlar belt.