3DTOPO said:
Rather than recommending what is best for everyone (as you have done many times in the past), or what is best for the majority of people, why not just state that you like something and that it works for you? Why try to tell everyone what is best for them?
You have to understand, I want to generate ideas here and I want people to tell me how that isn't the best tire. If you or anyone else can tell me a better tire, then please tell me a better tire and the reasons why. I want other people to also say what they consider the best tire is. This is how we learn or at least how I learn what is out there and what is suitable for the Sur-Ron.
Yes, I want to be provocative by saying its the "best", and it obviously works as people are more likely to try and refute my claim . This is what I want to motivate people to talk about my claim or refuting it to prove me wrong and sharing their opinion.
I would hope people are smart enough here to always research what they want before buying and not just seeing someone post this is the best and buy it.
To make it more clear, here is why a trials tire is probably the best all around tire for the rear. I laid out my reasons why in every post what I like about this tire and compared it to the stock.
Trials tire are made with soft compound and side walls that flex. This is very important because the sur-ron is light weight and the softer the sidewalls and tread compound the better. The Shinko 241 is the tire I like because it has soft compound and is a trials tire. If you buy a tire that has too hard side walls the tire will feel very harsh and you may not be able to mitigate this harshness with dropping the PSI of the tire. There could be better trials tires out there than the shinko 241.
Trials tires are good off-road and on-road. Good grip on slipper roots,rocks, and probably has decent grip on wet concrete. How much traction do you really need on this low powered sur-ron? Trials tire ride very smooth on the street and because of the tread pattern have a lot of contact with the ground and wear out less quickly.
Tire wears more slowly, which is why the stock tire is not suitable because it will wear out in 500 miles when riding both street and offroad. Shinko 241, even though it has a soft compound, wears slowly because of the larger tread pattern.
Trials tire do not rip up trails and grass. The sur-ron knobby tires rip up all the grass and trails very easily in the parks, the trials tire much less so. This should be a concern to many people here because many urban riders are limited to where they can ride and don't want to rip up all the grass and trails.
The 18x3.00 size is a very good size because it matches the front stock tire size. The engineers who designed the sur-ron into a great bike surely designed it around 19" wheels and a certain geometry and the bike handles great. I doubt messing around with changing a lot of these variables is a good idea. I'm average height and I see no reason to raise the bike higher with larger tires or change other variables. If this was an issue then you may want to raise the height with larger tires, but you could hurt handling. I did a lot of research into downhill racing and all these geometry changes are huge and make big differences, you just can't stop swapping in different size wheels and messing with this stuff without messing with the handling of the bike.
Am I 100% happy with the shinko 241 trials tire? NO, it weighs 7lbs and is still way too heavy for the Sur-Ron and its bicycle suspension made and designed for 2 lbs tires. The Sur-ROn doesn't need such a beefy tire made for bikes that weigh over 300 lbs, but unfortunately they don't design light weight tires for these small electric bikes. I don't think you can find any 2 ply, 18x3.00" tires. The Sur-Ron tire is 2 ply and that is why its very flexible and light weight.
Good video talking about the trials tire
[youtube]0h2-tvb9KXw[/youtube]