Quick question about tyres

tunguska

Rear tyre is worn and needs to be replaced but front one doesnt look as worn. Do you replace both tyres at the same time or do you replace one at a time as required?
Cheers

niceonetom

Nah, rears generally don't last as long as fronts because they carry more weight. There's no real reason they have to be changed at the same time.

Keep_Her_Lit

Generally, replacing one tyre at a time is fine. The front tyre just rolls, whereas the rear is driven by you and therefore wears much more quickly.

But you should still check the condition of the front tyre and replace if necessary.
- If the tyre is quite old, the compound can start to break down and perish. You’ll see lots of tiny cracks starting to open up along the sides of the tyre.
- Also, front tyres can get very battered, even though they haven’t worn right down. If the front tyre has lots of small cuts and holes from road debris, it might also be worth replacing it.

If replacing the rear only, it’s probably a good idea to keep the front and rear reasonably well matched in type and width. To take an extreme example, if you leave a big knobbly off-road tyre on the front (assuming its an MTB) but fit a narrow, low profile slick on the rear, your bike’s feel and handling is likely to be a little odd.

murph226

Why not put the new tyre on the front and the old front onto the rear wheel?

Zorba

I usually just switch the tires around when the back looks a bit worn i'd put it on the front wheel and put the tire that was on the front on the back, then when the two are worn i'd replace both and again switch the front with the back after a few thousand kms.

tunguska

murph226 wrote: »

Why not put the new tyre on the front and the old front onto the rear wheel?

Under normal circumstances that'd be a fine idea but the back tyre had developed a cut at the sidewall so that a small piece of the tube was extruding. Blew out as I was descending a fairly sharp hill.
But I'll keep that idea in mind for future reference.

Keep_Her_Lit

I prefer not to carry a worn tyre on the front. I’ll sometimes swap a part worn front tyre onto the rear but tend to avoid swapping from rear to front.

The squared-off profile of a worn tyre reduces the area of the contact patch when you lean just off vertical, which is where you are for most cornering. A loss of front wheel grip is harder to recover and can lead to a nastier fall.

A worn tyre is also at greater risk of a fast puncture or a blowout and again, the outcome tends to be worse if this occurs on the front.


So I tend to just leave the front tyre alone and change it when it has taken a fair bit of battering from road debris but still has a reasonably good profile.