Anyone still using 23 C tyres?

[chris667]

I never said anything about stability. I am talking about durability, and the fact that you are more likely to get punctures and damage your wheels on 23mm tyres than wider ones.

I don't see why this is contentious.

 

[mickle]

I've got 28c on my road bike, 32c on my street bike and 42c on my tourer. Back in the olden days i had a bike with 17c tyres!

 

[Alex321]

That simply isn't true, the width of the tyre has no bearing on how stable the bike is.

And he didn't suggest it might.

Up to a short few years ago no one turned up at the start of a race with tyres wider than 23, and that was from the lowliest amateur level all the way up, including the often wet and muddy cobbled classics and 60mph mountain descents.

Wider tyres are now seen to have performance advantages, but itis nothing to to with safety.

The safety point is about fragility, not stability. Hit a pothole at speed with 23mm tyres, you are far more likely to get a snakebite puncture than with 28mm tyres. And a front wheel puncture at speed can be dangerous indeed.

 

[raleighnut]

Ooh, get you, danger man! Not sure why you're trying to tell me how fast/good you are.

For the record, I've owned many bikes of varying levels of quality. Some of the ones I've enjoyed most were pretty bad, and I didn't like some of the good ones.

OK, dangerous is a poor choice of words. But the point I'm trying to make is you have to be careful riding hard on a bike with 23mm tyres in a way that you don't have to be when you ride 1.75 tyres. Riding a bike like that gives you a different sort of focus because the tyres and wheels are more fragile, no matter what you say.

I love my road bikes, but I'm not interested in riding them now. Even if I did, roads are not as good here in Derbyshire as they were when I lived in Oxfordshire 20+ years ago. I used to do 250 miles a week on road bikes with skinny tyres back then, and I loved it, mostly.

I was never into measuring how fast I was, but I know I used to get to work faster on 25s than I did on 23s. But that's a different discussion.

I remember my first MTB (Raleigh Mustang) when I was given it needed a lot of work so I put on a nice Aluminium crankset and new rear mech/chain/rear sprocket on some handlaced wheels John had built for me and thought as it's an MTB I'll put some real knobbly tyres on it.
Anyhoo I'd ridden it a few times and felt OK so one morning decided to go to work on it, my route included on it a fast downhill into a roundabout from a main road to a right turn onto an industrial estate (so 3rd exit) and I went in at about my usual speed on the correct lane to go 3/4 of the way round only to find it wouldn't hold the line as the tyres 'knobbles' squirmed about and the bike slowly (well quite quickly really) started understeering and drifting wide, luckily I had 3 lanes and the traffic was quite light that morning but it scared me