Schwalbe Marathon Plus ‘Flatless’ tyres
Tyres - what not to buy
It turns out that the Michelin tyres I bought for my bike in the previous post are not that good after all. In fact, they’re awful.
Being a novice I assumed that deep and funky-looking treads were a good thing, giving better grip and tracking. It turns out that I was wrong.
The Michelin Transworld tyres have a deep tread that just loves to scoop up rocks, twigs and pieces of broken beer bottle glass. These items get wedged into the deep grooves of the tread and, as the wheel rotates, hammered deeper and deeper with each revolution.
Then, because the treads are so deep, the thickness of rubber at the bottom of the tread groove is not actually very thick at all, so whatever has been picked up goes down, down, down, through the rubber and into the inner tube.
This happened on my very first ride with the new tyres, courtesy of some green beer bottle glass. When I finally got home, aside from the glass that caused the flat, there were half a dozen small rocks and other pieces of glass stuck in the tread grooves as well, all waiting their turn to give me an unpleasant 20 minutes on the roadside patching and changing a tyre. This clearly wasn’t going to work.
After some web research I found a better choice - the ‘Flatless’ range from specialist bike tyre maker Schwalbe. Their ‘Marathon Plus’ tyre has minimal tread (tread really isn’t necessary on push-bikes, so I’ve found out) and a thick belt of special rubber under the surface face. You can push a thumb-tack into these things and they don’t go flat.
$89 a tyre later, an hour of sweating and swearing (they’re a VERY tight fit) and I have a truly awesome set of tyres. They’ve been out four times now without so much as a mark from glass or rocks. The tread picks up nothing, they’re a nice balance of firmness whilst still shock-absorbing and they’re much quieter than the Michelins.
All I can hear when riding is the chain whirring over the cogs. Lovely.
