What tyres for winter time

martylaa wrote:

What road tyres do you use in the winter to combat ice, grit, water etc etc, there's a lot of hills around my way and they do some black ice pretty easily on there?

If you must ride when there is ice, then ice spikes are the only thing that will reliably keep you upright.
Otherwise you need to avoid ice.

Cycling in the other winter conditions just requires some tough, grippy (softer rubber, rather than knobbly) and wide tyres.

I put on some marathon winter 700*35s last night.
They fit a PX Kaffenback /Pompino disk forks & sks longboards easily.
4 lines of studs, at high pressures the centre 2 lines are in contact with the road, so a bit of noise and feedback, but confidence on frost and shiny black stuff.
If I let the pressure out the outer 2 rows of studs on the shoulders will also be in contact, and I'd be happier on refrozen snow and ice.
The 700*35 s are less draggy than the 26*1.5 s I've used.

Looking at the diagram of the narrower tyres linked above, you can see the holes where the outer rows of studs would be.

I decided to retool the MTB with these as I have no clearance under the mudguards on my road bike:

http://www.bike-discount.de/shop/k1040/ ... -wire.html

Cheap and gave me confidence across various conditions last week. My first purchase from Bike-discount but they were excellent.

dmclite-3.0 wrote:

I run Vittoria zaffiros with the wire beads through winter. Run under cruds, bombproof, roll ok and are £8 a pop.

Bombproof is not the same as iceproof though. If you need to ride where it's icey Zaffiros won't help.

dmclite-3.0 wrote:

16mm wrote:

dmclite-3.0 wrote:

I run Vittoria zaffiros with the wire beads through winter. Run under cruds, bombproof, roll ok and are £8 a pop.

Bombproof is not the same as iceproof though. If you need to ride where it's icey Zaffiros won't help.

If you ride on ice then you need a skidoo matey, no bike tyres are not going to be any good.

See posts above, schwable marathon winters with spikes are discussed & they're designed for ice, and really good. The original poster mentioned cycling on ice specifically. With these tyres ice is no problem, so you can pull a sidoo.