Originally Posted by
willydstyle
So I'm getting my first folder, a Tern BYB that comes stock with 42-406 Schwalbe Citizens. I've been riding 700c Panaracer Pasela PTs for *years* now, and have really settled on them as my ideal combo of weight/puncture protection/ride quality, and would love if they came in 20", but alas they do not. The Schwalbe Citizens are a *very* inexpensive tire, and my experience with cheap tires is that they are never really good, so I would love to upgrade them immediately. It seems like the most-commonly-available 20" tire is the Marathon family, and I *hate* how Marathon Plus rides, so those are right out. Some tires I'm considering are the Contact Urban (hard to find in the US) and the Marathon Racer (honestly I'm hesitant simply due to the Marathon name and how much I hate how the Marathon Plus rides).
With these facts in mind, what 20" tires do y'all think I might like that come in 37-45 mm width? What tires in this size range have the best combination of ride quality and puncture protection, similar to Pasela PT's in 700c?
I had a similarly low opinion of Schwalbe tyres until I got the plain old Marathons. Why Schwalbe persists with the Racers and the Plus is a mystery to me. The Racers felt slower with more drag than the regular iteration of the tyre. I read an article by someone who tested the rolling resistance of the Racer and he confirmed that it actually has inferior rolling performance to the non-racer standard issue version.
I rode from Belfast to Carlingford and then along the border through Armagh, Monaghan, Enniskillen, Donnegal and then to Derry on Racers. Puncture protection wasn't great and as mentioned above these didn't feel fast like their name suggests.
Replaced the Racers later on during the same trip in Nottingham, England with Schwalbe Kojaks, which in my opinion were junk. I got a flat on my 3km commute home from the bike shop. Also, the skinnier racing profile of these diminished the actual size of the 406 20" wheels reducing the gear inches and making the bike more jarring and less comfortable. They certainly didn't make the bike feel faster. The only thing I can say in the Kojak's favour is that these were light.
I persisted for a few weeks with the Kojaks, constantly repairing flats until while visiting a friend in a rural locale in Germany I gave up on them and replaced with some very cheap department store tyres which were clunky and nasty but better than the Kojaks because at least I wasn't fixing flats every several kilometers on average. But they were far from satisfying.
When I visited Box Bikes in Berlin (a shop that specialises in folders) they suggested Marathons. I was skeptical, but when they brought a tyre out for me to examine I could see immediately from the quality of construction and the ability to hold 100psi that these were a step up from the other Marathons and Kojaks I'd been using, so I bought them. A few weeks later I rode across a big chunk of Spain on these and then used them everyday while living up a steep riverbed (which I rode up and down daily) in the mountains in Granada province. Three years and thousands of clicks later one of the tyres is still going strong. The other I had to replace only because I wore my back rim out and had a point where the breaking surface snagged the brake pads locking the rear wheel so that the tyre skidded and wore down in one place creating a flat spot, so no fault of the tyre itself. Puncture protection is excellent and I almost never gat punctures and I really don't worry about this happening even when I'm out and about even a hundred kilometres from home. They're not super düper lightweight, but they roll well and get the job done with minimal inner tube maintenance.
So, the long and short of my long winded tale of the life and death of my recent tyres is that you might want to take another look at the standard Marathons. But don't bother with any other Schwalbe product in 20" as in my experience these really are at best underwhelming and at worst total crap.
