fooferdoggie 

I dont ride when there is snow or ice on the roads but cold and wet.I have the teravail on right now. i am running tubeless on my trek e bike so its heavy. but last winter I was on the stock tires now I am tubeless. but I dont know how either tire will work in such conditions. the rampart may be too puncture prone for winter/wet riding. this is on the road with a tiny bit of gravel at most.good traction is the most important. but there is a lot more junk on the road in the winter.

rumrunn6

that 2nd tire you photo'd, seems to have more tread

roadcrankr

I always prefer slicks for rain-riding. Bicycle tires do not hydroplane.
Get the most rubber on the road as possible. With puncture resistance, of course.
Junk on the road will simply get in all those deep channels of the bottom tires.

Trakhak

Scott Mathauser said the same about brake pads, criticizing the common practice of pointlessly interrupting the brake rubber with surface patterns, which is why, in addition to adding fins to the shoes for heat dispersion, he designed his pads to present an unbroken flat surface to the rim.

TC1

This statement is completely wrong. All tires hydroplane. There's even a formula for calculating the speed at which your tires will hydroplane -- and the first version was authored by NASA in 1963, so you should've heard about it by now. Your hydroplane speed in miles per hour is the (square root of the tire pressure) times 10.2 -- ie, 56 mph for 30 psi.

Now, you might not be able to achieve that speed solely by the force of your pedaling, but unless you have never descended a hill, that's irrelevant. Plenty of hills are sufficiently steep for a bicycle to plane up on water -- especially since the aforementioned calculated speed only applies to planing both wheels simultaneously, and few bikers will stay upright that long. They will almost always slam the bike down as soon as their front tire planes.

And, if you don't believe NASA, you can try Youtube, where plenty of evidence is being compiled.

You Tube

Stop repeating dangerous myths.

roadcrankr

Did I repeat dangerous myths elsewhere? Dang...you went all in on a simple comment.
Let me fix it for you: "At slow speeds on flat ground, bicycle tires do not hydroplane."
Satisfied?

downtube42

Tubeless sealant will deal with the type of small punctures from typical winter road debris. I wouldn't get too wrapped up in tire selection unless you have issues. Keep your sealant fresh, carry plugs and tire inflation device and know how to use them.

Since you don't deal with snow or ice, the cold aspect is insignificant as far as tire selection.

Trakhak

Per the late Jobst Brandt, former Porsche engineer and designer of bike tires, from this page:

The contact patch of a slick bicycle tire is a long sharply pointed
canoe shape that displaces water better than any tread can. The width
of this contact is smaller than the smooth area of most any car tire
and certainly smaller than the smooth tires of commercial aircraft
that have tread thickness indicating grooves about 4-6 inches apart.
They, having round cross section tires also displace water but at up
to 200mph, not 30-40mph as a bicycle. Hydroplaning on a bicycle is
not a consideration the same as wheel balancing is not. Neither
effect comes into play at the tire sizes and speeds that occur.

fooferdoggie 

Ok well I ended up answering my own question or maybe its always this way. it was 35 degrees yesterday and rain. so I tested how the rear braked and it seem to take much less effort to lock the back. as soon as it locked the bike was
fishtailing. I know it did not do that in summer. but i dont know if it did it while cold and dry. these tires are harder since it got below 45 and that may be whats going on. I just hate to break out the new tires to see if I could sell them as new. the smooth tires have been great overall. But I got to test them today when two idiots walked out between parked cars in front of me. seemed slower at slowing then expected but its been last year since I had to do an emergency stop.

TC1

Thank you, I was desperately hoping that someone was going to reply with this asinine remark by Brandt.

Let's think about the unbridled idiocy of this statement by Brandt, since we're here. He claims that a tire resembles a canoe and therefore cannot float on water.

Does anyone start to see why this is one of the more nonsensical claims found on the whole internet? A canoe, is a boat. It is specifically, and effectively, designed precisely to float on water. The idea that a tire is canoe-shaped, and therefor resistant to exactly that same behavior, would be comical if it were not so earnestly and often repeated by people who have given the matter no thought whatsoever.

This issue has been studied, repeatedly, by people who are apparently much smarter than Brandt, and we've plenty of video evidence illustrating exactly how wrong he was. This is why I implore people to "Stop repeating dangerous myths."

TC1

Both factors will have some effect on your traction.

Rubber tires generate traction by deforming at a microscopic level into the imperfections in the surface on which you are traveling. When that surface is wet, there's a layer of incompressible water filling-in many of those imperfections, and this reduces the ability of the tire to "grip" the surface. When the entire contact patch of the tire becomes supported by this layer of water, traction disappears entirely -- and you probably crash. Tread helps here by providing space for the water to reside in, without altering the tire/road interface.

Also, typical tire rubber compounds become less malleable with reduced temperature, and that also reduces its ability to deform into those imperfections -- even if they are dry.

One of the reasons that automotive winter tires work so much better in the winter than regular tires is that they are usually made from unconventional rubber compounds that maintain their flexibility at lower ambient temperatures. The tradeoff is that they will usually wear extremely fast when run on warm pavement. I would assume, but don't know for sure, that at least some bicycle tires are made similarly -- probably mostly fat bike tires, though.

79pmooney

I knew I liked my tubulars in the rain BITD. I used to drop the pressure from 100+ to considerably less, maybe even around 70. Well, the square root of 70 X 10.4 = 87 mph, a speed I just don't sweat in the wet. (Rode down Smuggler's Notch in the rain using my brakes only the first three turns. About as fast as I've ever gone. Probably 100 of us in all the races. No one crashed so I assume no one hydroplaned. I certainly didn't.)

79pmooney

The tires I like in the wet are the Vittoria Open Paves (those ones with the green tread stripes). Little tread patter that rather quickly goes smooth. Stay good in the wet until you see cord. They made them with the green on the side tread and later, only the center tread. I cannot detect any difference in the ride. The new Corsa G+ and G2.0 are good in the rain but not as much as the Open Paves were. (Much better tires overall. Fewer flats, better rolling, last a lot longer ...) Yes, expensive. I like staying up in the rain. One ambulance ride costs 3 years worth of tires.

Trakhak

From this page:
"Even with automobiles, actual hydroplaning is very rare. It is a much more real problem for aircraft landing on wet runways. The aviation industry has studied this problem very carefully, and has come up with a general guideline as to when hydroplaning is a risk. The formula used in the aviation industry is:

Speed (in knots) = 9 X the square root of the tire pressure (in psi.)"

A table can be found on the page that shows predicted hydroplaning speeds for round-section tires (such as bicycle and airplane tires). According to the table, round-section tires inflated to 100, 80, 60, and 40 p.s.i. can hydroplane at speeds of 104, 93, 80, and 66 mph, respectively.

TC1

Not all hydroplaning is terminal. If you watch those videos above, you will see some examples of very high caliber bike handling, where bikes are wiggling around underneath their riders, due to hydroplaning -- but the riders manage to "keep the rubber side down", impressively.

TC1

How many automobiles run smooth tires?

Why are F1 and all other racing wets treaded?

That formula is outdated, and the constant has been lowered in recent years by additional research -- as I already mentioned, so I'm not sure what the point here was.

As an aside, you may want to be cautious about quoting from a site that contains unqualified gems like this ( and yes, I'm aware of Brown's reputation, and that site still contains many errors ):

I'm not sure anyone ever believed that, but regardless, it has long-since been experimentally disproven.

TC1

More like 30 years' worth of tires. Last time I was billed for a fancy taxi ride, it was $2200 -- and these folks got charged about $9k.

PeteHski

F1 tyres are run at about 20 psi, so slicks aquaplane very easily above 45 mph.

Slick 30 mm road bike tyres at 65 psi don't aquaplane unless you are going over 80 mph. They still have less grip in the wet, but they don't aquaplane.

TC1

You missed the point. The claim was that it is rare for automobiles to hydroplane. "Rare" isn't a sufficiently-precise term to argue, but regardless, hydroplaning automobiles would vastly more common if they all ran slick tires. They do not, precisely for that reason.

These are not two different phenomena. "Having less grip in the wet" is hydroplaning. If you believe otherwise, explain the process by which gravity temporarily ceases to operate, resulting in that reduction of traction.

PeteHski

We only refer to it as hydroplaning when there is enough water pressure generated under the tyre to lift the tyre completely off the underlying road surface losing all directional control. It is a relatively high speed phenomena as estimated by the formula quoted above. The full term is dynamic hydroplaning, but we usually just refer to it as hydro planing or aquaplaning in Europe.

At lower speeds the water acts more like a lubricant and coolant in reducing friction, but we don’t call that hydroplaning. We just call it low grip and that’s what we experience on all wet tyres, treaded or slick.

Road bike tyres tend to be slick because there is no benefit in adding a tread pattern in a vain attempt to avoid dynamic hydroplaning. Gravel tyres have tread only to generate mechanical grip/traction on loose off-road surfaces.

Car tyres are so much wider and are driven at much higher speeds, so tread patterns are required and effective in preventing hydroplaning at normal highway speeds. Again by hydroplaning we mean the tyre riding completely on top of a wedge of water under the contact patch. Not merely reduced friction due to water lubrication and cooling.

I’ll leave you to pick that apart in your usual style, but you won’t be able to bs me like you already have with your pseudo definition of hydroplaning as any reduction of grip in wet conditions.

Everyone else can make their own minds up.

Trakhak

The disconnect: loss of traction on a wet surface at moderate or low speed does not represent hydroplaning. A car that spins its driving wheels in wet conditions when accelerating from a stop is not hydroplaning, for example. As Sheldon Brown knew.

PeteHski

I think this would be a good tyre for the OP:-

https://www.pirelli.com/tyres/en-gb/...urato-all-road

I have used the pure road version (32C) of this tyre in wet, cold conditions and the grip was excellent. Also very puncture resistant. The one above is available in 650B and 45C width.

TC1

This statement demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how rubber tires work. Rubber tires do not adhere to road surfaces. Rubber tires generate traction because they are pressed against the road surface by the force of gravity, and because tire rubbers are malleable compounds, they deform into the imperfections in that road surface, and the resulting interlocking interface is what we call "traction".

"Lubricant" does not effect the force of gravity. The phenomenon that occurs which reduces your traction on a wet road is that water fills in those road surface imperfections, and prevents the rubber from interfacing with it. This phenomenon is called "hydroplaning" -- regardless of whether it results in complete or partial loss of traction.

Just out of curiosity, and playing the Devil's advocate, what property of road bike tires do you propose makes them unique in this regard?

Of note, the traction problem represented by gravel is similar in many ways to that of hydroplaning. When a tire rolls over loose gravel, the loose bits prevent the tire from interfacing with the fixed substrate underneath -- very much like water does, on pavement. And, very much the same way that tread works to alleviate that problem on roads, knobby tread on off-road tires provides void space for the troublesome material -- rocks instead of water -- to exist in, and allows the tire rubber to reach a surface that is relatively immobile.

By the way, all "grip/traction" is "mechanical".

Again, this demonstrates a poor understanding of the physics involved. Vehicle speed is an important factor, yes, although bicycles powered by gravity or electricity can reach similar speeds, but the tire width is irrelevant. The key is the pressure of the tire on the ground, which, hopefully, you realize is proportional to the pressure inside the tire.

Again, there is no "lubrication", and water is not necessarily a coolant. If we typically slathered glue all over our tires before each trip, and relied on it for adhesion to the road, you would have a point -- but we do not.

You are going to want to study the relevant physics in far more depth before engaging in that braggadocio.

Yes, and some of us are right, and some of us are you.

TC1

Okay, here we go again -- explain the phenomenon which causes gravity to cease to function when those wheels spin.

If gravity is still working, then those tires are still being pressed into the road surface. And being pressed into the road surface causes the tire rubber to deform into the road surface imperfections. And when that deformation occurs, the resulting interlock is what we call "traction".

PeteHski

LOL. I’m going to just hand back my 1st class degree in Mech Eng and Masters in Vehicle Dynamics and forget that I worked for 20 years in F1 motorsport reaching chief engineer level because some dude (or AI bot) on the internet says I don’t have a clue.

Sorry but I’m not wading through all this bs. I’m not even convinced you are a real person. It’s hard to imagine someone that far up their own ass (sorry mods!).