Originally Posted by
TandemGeek
Speaking only to tandems, as it's far different once you include the rest of the bikes in our stable....
Absolutely, which is why I even posed the question here.
Originally Posted by
TandemGeek
Good luck trying to analyze the data. Frankly, it's analogous to figuring out why men prefer... (and what a list that would be).
I'm hoping to be able to say something of the form "If you're a <light/med/heavy> team who plans to <race/credit card tour...> and has a bike with <700c/26 inch> wheels, the recommendations seem to be coming in in favour of ..."
Good chance there will be holes in the matrix. But when people ask for tire recommendations, informed responses require knowledge of the sort of use, team weight, and wheel size. Some of the listed uses will never be mine, but I figure to make it generally useful, I should try to be reasonably comprehensive. No doubt I've missed something. I think there may be more hope for chains than tires, as the matrix is basically two dimensional - speeds and on road/off. If chain quality is totally unrelated to anything like price, then it might come out looking like "why men prefer...", but with tires, I've found that many of the recommendations that have appeared on the forum come in a small number of specific sizes. If I'm looking for a durable 26x1.25" tire I can go to all the tire manufacturer's sites and find perhaps a dozen choices, probably fewer. And some of these sites tell me about tires not sold in all markets. At that point it gets to be a bit of a needle-in-a-haystack job to find reviews/recommendations on those from tandem owners. So I'm suspecting, that when you control for size and primary use, there will only be a small number of recommendations in any category, with the possible exception of 700x25c or so.