Of bikes and tyres

 Post lockdown I've been riding my bike quite a bit for exercise - either round town early in the morning, or latterly, a longer circuit in the afternoon.

Up to now, my trail bike has had standard mountain bike tyres, but a few days ago on my way home - in fact only 500m from home - I had a flat and had to wheel my bike back.

When I had a look at it, I discovered that the tyre had shredded and embarrassingly, was still one I'd bought in York 20 years ago. The other tyre wasn't much better.

Unlike my Kuwahara, which had been used for commuting, and which of course meant that the tyres and tubes had been replaced through normal wear and tear, my trail bike hadn't really been ridden seriously for a decade or so.

To be fair, when I had it serviced, the bicycle mechanic did warn me that the tyres probably needed replacing sooner rather than later.

So, new tyres and inner tubes then.

Now, I'm basically riding on bitumen with a small amount of  graded dirt road, which probably means that even standard mountain bike tyres are overkill, so I've decided to try some slicker commuter style tyres with a a lower rolling resistance to see how that goes. 

I've previously used some half way house commuter tyres (ie ones with a bit of knobble and tread but not that much on the Kuwahara) and they coped well with the vagaries of Canberra bike paths and a Canberra winter, so I reckoned that as I'm a fair weather cyclist these days, slick tyres with a minimal amount of groove might work well enough.

Living in rural Victoria as I do, I opted for mail order rather than driving to the nearest bike shop and finding that they didn't have what I wanted in stock.

They came pretty quickly, and while fitting them took longer than it should - it's way too long since I changed a bike tyre and I was a bit slow and out of practice, I've now got a bike with some shiny new tyres.

Other than a quick ride up and down the street to check they were ok I havn't ridden anywhere yet to see how they handle, but they're amazingly quiet riding on bitumen ...