good morning youtube finally got the front tire changed out and got my fenders on it's finally
started to get some rain and the trails up in the mountains are getting a little muddy so i
have the rear fenders on as well so this was the old rear tire that i took off a few months back
when i had the broken spoke this is the front tire that i just replaced there so a little bit
of background this was the original front tire that was on the bike when i built it in 2012.
ran that for i think about two years and then when i converted to tubeless i moved this tire to the
back so this ran in the back for uh maybe about a year and then i had the puncture in this tire and
i took it off and replaced it with this tire now this tire spent four years on the back of the bike
so i showed you a video of putting this patch tire on i originally put it on the front left this one
on the back so like i said this tire ended up with about four years on the back of the bike and then
it was about a year and a half ago that i swapped these now another point is both these tires have
about five and a half years of riding on them and you can see this one still has fairly decent tread
this one is like all gone and the big difference is this spent more time on the back of the bike
than this tire now this tire is like eight and a half years old and you can see how the
rubber is cracking and that's why i pulled this off the bike i was going to replace this tire
about this time anyway i had just added sealant to both these tires last summer when i had to
change this one so i tried to recover some of the sealant out of the tire but it's really hard to do
so with this tire i waited until either i needed to add sealant or we started getting enough rain
to turn the trails muddy and i needed to change the tire for the better tread so a couple of
things i've learned about these tires one is the rubber lasts about eight years so you need to wear
the tire out before the rubber starts cracking the other thing is on my bike with type of riding i do
four years is about all you can get out of a tire if it's on the back of the bike now if
you put a tire on the front and left it there it would probably look like that after eight years
it would still have plenty of tread but it would be cracking to the point you had to change it out
so that's where i came up with my tire management plan is i'm going to leave these two new tires on
the bike for three years that way i'll still have tread on the back then i can swap them put this
tire on the back which will have almost new tread and then do another three years and then i'll
replace both tires and hopefully they'll still have like that much tread but look like this tire
with good solid uncracked rubber so when i originally swapped this and put this tire on
the back and this tire on the front this tire was worn down to about that level so there was a two
things i was thinking about one was on the front it's not going to wear that much so if if the
tread's kind of worn down it's not that big a deal and i was thinking on pavement this smoother tread
compared to this might actually roll easier and be quieter and then when i changed out this tire
a few weeks ago i noticed a huge change in noise and what it is when you have this center tread
here especially on on a newer tire the tire rolls on the center tread blocks and these intermediate
blocks here don't touch the road that much so it's fairly silent but on this tire when the
tread wears down that far you can see how these intermediate blocks are completely worn down
too the whole width of the tread from there to there is touching and these things make
a lot of noise it almost sounds like a knobby mountain bike tire rolling down the pavement
and that noise also is higher rolling resistance when i put this new tire on totally silent
and the bike just feels so much more responsive i'm used to riding slick road tires on my road
bike and that's like tons of tread on a road bike tire but with this tread design you can see how
all these side lugs were touching and that just adds so much rolling resistance this tire was
okay it was just starting to touch you can see some of the places it's touching these side lugs
so those are some of the things i learned and that's what i'm trying to avoid by using a new set
of tires three years on the front i'll move it to the back for three years and then i will get rid
of both tires at the end of six years and like i mentioned i could run a tire on the back for like
four years and get down to something between these two and then i would change the tire in the back
run it another four years and i could probably get eight years out of the front so that would be
three tires in eight years with my six year plan you would use two tires in six years
and if you did the four four year in the back and eight year in the front that's three tires
in eight years but you're only getting two years out of that extra third tire
that's the only real drawback i see on these tires is that they're rather expensive that's
about 150 dollars worth of tires and so i'm trying to maximize the useful life of these
things to get the most value out of that 150 dollars so by using two tires in six years it's
about twenty five dollars a year for tires i ran a cheaper tire it would be changing tires more often
the other thing i'm trying to minimize because i run these tubeless changing tires
is kind of a messy affair and it's time-consuming so i want to minimize that as much as possible
so i'm only having to swap tires once in the middle and then put new tires on versus if i
ran a tire that i had to change out every year or two i'd be changing tires all the time i mean it
feels like a brand new bike with that tire on the front i mean it's just amazing the difference that
is that thing really rolls easy you just feel it you know you coast farther the steering you
turn the handlebar and it's just instant response where this one was kind of a delayed response it
almost felt like you had a flat tire it was that sort of sluggish but running the same pressure
in this tire and that tire there's just a huge difference that makes i was thinking that might be
better on the road having worn out tread but it turns out it's actually worse if you're running
these tires you really don't want to wear them down too far you lose traction and you
actually increase rolling resistance and noise they get really noisy when they wear down that far
compared to like this and that was the problem i couldn't tell when i was running these two tires
it was noisy and i thought it might just be due to going front and back treadwear is a little
different on the front and the back i know in my truck when i swap front and rear tires
you'll hear it be a little bit noisier for a while until the tread wear
evens out and then it sounds normal again so i was thinking that was the case with the tires when i
put this one on the front had this one on the back i thought oh it's just swapping them around
it'll get better in a while and it didn't sharing my experience with these tires if you have any
input on that feel free to post up in the comment section down below and as always thanks for
watching