Tyres are the contact zone between bike and road. Tyres define the ride. Changing tyres is the quickest, easiest way to adapt a bike to different uses.
No bike can do everything, but if you only have space, or budget, for one machine there’s an easy way to extend its range: change the tyres.
It really is as simple as that. Sometimes, anyway. In fact, quite often.
Suppose, for instance, you have a mountain bike and you’re invited to go on a long challenge ride on the roads, or a touring holiday. Rather than a rental bike, which might have an awkward riding position or uncomfortable saddle, you’d like to use the bike you’re familiar with. But you know that your mountain bike is sluggish and noisy on tarmac.
Solution: swap those knobbly tyres for some slick or semi-slick ones. It takes ten or fifteen minutes, the cost is minimal (probably less than a day or two’s rental of a different bike), and you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. The ride will be quieter, smoother and a lot more efficient. It won’t match a thoroughbred road bike, but it’ll get significantly closer.
You can go the other way too, to some extent. A lot of hybrid bikes, especially those with suspension forks, could handle moderate mountain biking with the addition of fat tyres with a chunky tread. We do need to stress the word ‘moderate’ here and bear in mind that frames and other components won’t be engineered for the impacts that come with drop-offs and jumps.
One word of warning; before splurging on fatter tyres, make sure there’s sufficient clearance; you don’t want to find that those new tyres rub on the frame or forks. You’ll never have this problem when fitting a thinner tyre than the existing.
You also need to check compatibility between tyre and rim. Not all 26-inch wheels are the same width. You may need to swap inner tubes as well as the outer casing. Any decent bike shop will be able to confirm that the new tyres will seat correctly on the rim. They’ll even fit them for you if you want.
It’s not just the tread pattern and size of the tyre that affects the way it rides, but also how hard you inflate it. As a general rule, the bigger the volume, the lower the pressure, and vice versa. Mountain bikers will also adjust tyre pressures to account for different conditions - running low pressures for extra traction in gloopy mud, for example.
Mountain bike tyres may run as low as 30 psi in some circumstances; you could pump the same tyres to 50 or 60 psi and get an immediate improvement in their rolling on hardpack and tarmac. A narrower semi-slick on the same rim could run at 80 psi. The ultra-thin tyres on road race machines will be pumped to well over 100 psi and those on track bikes might be at 150 or more.
It’s all very well swapping tyres every now and then, say before a week’s holiday, but few will want to do it on a daily basis. The obvious answer here is to have two sets of wheels. The initial cost is obviously higher, but far less than a whole new bike, and switching takes a matter of seconds. If you do this it’s a very good idea to make sure both sets of rims are the same width so brakes will work equally well on both without adjustment.
