Now I was willing to accept this if you wanted something special. Mud tyres or spikes or combination road / gravel tyres or even doing 45° angle corner leans at 80kph down Alpe d’Huez or whatever but surely, SURELY, for just going A to B in an paved enviroment it wouldn’t matter?
Yeah no turns out the premium shit does feel great and rolls better. I can never return.
IMO with core bicycle components I think “midrange” is usually best. They’re more expensive than I’d like them to be but you don’t need to spend $100 per tire either (which is what people do pay for the most popular road tire and niche tires). You can usually get very nice tires in the $50 range, definitely when on sale. Nice panaracers, pirellis, Vittorias, continentals, schwalbes. And they’ll cost just as much as some of the less nice tires, even!
For another example, you could buy a Chris King headset for $200-$400 or get a solid sealed bearing headset for $40 and the latter will be easily serviceable and not feel different at all. But if you pay $10 for a headset you might get trash bearings or non-round sleeves (or something good if you do careful research).
Or you can get $1200 carbon wheels or $150 lightweight aluminum and probably barely tell the difference. But if you buy $40 wheels on Craigslist there’s an 50% chance they’re pitted and so the hub needs to be replaced (itself like $50). And it better be almost exactly the same if you want to reuse the spokes. Oh and you need a $150 tool or to pay $50-$100 for a shop to rebuild it, etc etc.
Same applies to frames, pedals, groupsets, saddles, etc etc. IMO the main exceptions are for Chinese OEMs or derivatives. They are often just as good for 1/3 the price but you have to be a big nerd about what you’re getting. Like you can get great sealed bearing mtb pedals for like $10 on AliExpress. The “real deal” is functionally identical (sometimes the design was copied from them…) and $60.
I do tend to be careful on the main safety components though, which is basically everything up front: bars, stem, headset, fork, front wheel and tire. If those fail catastrophically it is a big safety risk. Then, I prefer something that’s been used and recommended by many people or is a well-known OEM.
Yeah no turns out the premium shit does feel great and rolls better.
On top of that, it lasts three times as long (speaking for the Continental premium tires vs. their cheap basic stuff) making it kind of a no-brainer which to get for someone cycling regularly.
Upgrading your tires is still the cheapest and most effective performance tuning you can do.
On top of that, it lasts three times as long
Vimes boots theory
Vimes boots theory
TIL Terry Pratchet coined the name of an economic theory.
Thanks for the info!
did not need more reasons to never buy a Lugano II again
Nicer Shampoo Tragically Worth The Extra Money
spoiler
CHICAGO—Reacting with dismay to the immediate positive results yielded by the hair care product, local woman Taylor Suthers confirmed Thursday that the nicer shampoo she had bought was tragically worth the extra money. “Aw, goddammit, my hair really does look softer and smoother,” said Suthers, who appeared visibly distraught as she ran a hand through her hair to confirm that the $49.99 bottle of meadowfoam-infused shampoo had, indeed, left her hair neither dried-out nor greasy. “I just grabbed it off the shelf because they didn’t have Pantene, and I figured most shampoos cost the same. It definitely seems like I’m retaining natural oils now or whatever. And it smells like sandalwood, which I really do prefer to whatever the cheaper stuff smells like. Ugh, this sucks.” At press time, Suthers had reportedly groaned upon realizing that the nicer conditioner from the same brand would probably be worth the extra money, too.
Pricier Product Resented For Its Higher Quality
This is why I ride 27" rims. So I can’t have anything nice.
Do you mean 27,5’‘?
But those are a reasonably well stocked tire size… So really 27’'?
If true, what kind of bikes use these?It’s an old standard, quite a bit larger than 27.5" ironically. Slightly larger than 700c even. I have an old bike that uses them, fortunately continental still makes gatorskins that fit them.
Are there even more than 2 or 3 tires available for those?
LoL, yes 27" tyres come in 2 or 3 different sizes: with ISO bead seat diameters 584mm, 609mm, 630mm.
650b 4 lyfe
27" and 27.5" are not the same thing. 27" always means 630mm with the exception of some obscure Danish bikes that I’m not aware of.
Kenda stopped making 27-inch tires, so now your options are old stock of the (formerly) $5 tires, or $100 tires from the single brand that still makes them, and most stores don’t have them.
give me gatorskins or give me death
I can’t say the same for hubs. The more expensive they are the more obnoxious they seem to sound. With the exception of Onyx hubs and other one way clutch hubs. But the inexpensive Shimano hub that came on my mountain bike is almost as silent as a clutch hub, making just a slight ticking sound when coasting that I don’t even notice compared to the wonderful sound of my tires on dirt.
They’re also the most repair and service friendly, with their cup and cone/pawl design. Shimano has kind of solved bike components
Unfortunately I didn’t know this and ended up not servicing my hubs on my road bike until it was too late and the cup was pitted. I still repacked it and replaced the balls, but a new hub is in order if I get back to riding that bike. It’s also probably about time for me to service the hubs on my mountain bike now that I think about it, they get a lot more abuse.
That basically works out along the lines of hoovers where people think if it doesn’t scream at you it’s cheap. There’s really very little technical need for them to do that and how good of a hub they are is also entirely removed from that question
“If my hub isn’t screaming bloody murder, how will I remember that it cost more than my first bike???”
I know in the case of mountain bike hubs, the trend for higher engagement points is at least partially to blame. I hear the fast engagement is nice, but I can’t take the sound. Maybe one day I’ll get to experience a clutch hub. I’m curious what it’ll be like on tricky technical climbs, but I mostly want the silence.
Anyone have a good recommendation for run flat/punctureless tires? Looking at these:
I can’t speak to this one specifically but unless you try to MTB a mountain of broken glass I think Schwalbes or Gatorskins’d do you plenty fine. There’s a reason airless tyres on a bicycle never really gotten anywhere so far and it’s because they suck hella ass according to everybody who tried them
Are those you mentioned the type that inflates, but just has sealant already inside for punctures? Hit what I thought was a modest pothole with my road bike and had a blowout.
I don’t think they make Schwalbe Marathons (sorry forgot to include that) or Gatorskins in tubeless but they’re just real heavy duty with pneumatic tubes, nigh unkillable.
That said, if your problem is blowouts on a roadbike due to a pothole I’m guessing that’s a snakebite which the above mentioned would provide some protection on because they’re heavy and wire-reinforced as hell but doesn’t really solve your problem.
If pothole-on-a-roadbike is your concern I would suggest looking into tubeless. Airless tyres have fucking garbo comfort and rolling resistance according to every review I’ve ever read while tubeless doesn’t and if you hit a pothole so hard your tubeless tyre pops out of the bead enough to be broken your main concern’d probably be not dying rather than the tyre
