Mountain Biking - And now...a word from our sponsors...

I just wanted to take a moment here for a shameless plug to Kenda. I faxed my order the day before yesterday and I came home today shocked to see that my tires are here. Good service from mah boyeez!
http://www.bikeforums.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=124195&d=1257470588\
http://www.bikeforums.net/attachment.php?attachmentid=124196&d=1257470602

:thumb:

I thought you were a Maxxis guy?

Max who?

How do you order Kenda direct, by the way?

Ya know...you'd think I'd know how to tell you to do that, but I think the cookie-cutter answer is to contact your local Kenda dealer.

Here's the dealer search page:
http://kendausa.com/bicycle/dealers/dealer_alabama.html

They do have a "weekly specials" page where they sell the closeout stuff at stupid-low prices:
http://kendausa.com/bicycle/weeklyspecials.html

To order the closeout stuff, you need to contact:
Cindy Gardner 614.729.7881/866.536.3287 x7881 or
Stefano Lumbaca 614.729.7882/866.536.3287 x7882

Stefano and Cindy are sharp and really nice peeps.

Dood, 3 dollar tires!? I'm feelin' some bike drifting in my near future. . .

yeah seriously those are some good deals! Thanks for the link. I'm guessing they never throw small block 8s or any of the more popular tires on there.

Nahh...just closeout stuff. They've had Cortez and BG's there.

Hmmm...the had some DH tires there for a while...Scrub, what are they called? You had some at some point.

Kolossals?

I'll second the vouch for Kenda. I ran 2.5 Excavators all season. I had a brand new pair of 2.5 Nevegals that I carted around with me to every race in case I didn't happen to like the Exs for a particular course condition and I never even mounted them up. There was never a need to. They seriously made me forget Minion DHFs, which I did not think would be possible.

The people there are great and they get racing. In fact, nearly every time this season I've sent an e-mail to Jim W, I get an 'out of office reply' because he is off at some race doing support. That's cool. He's at Iceman this weekend.

Kinetics 2.6 - same as the 2.35 version, just a lot bigger. They are about the size of most 2.5 meats. Non DH variety was on sale for $5 each. Picked up four front/four rear. Also have the same tire in the DH version. Nice big beefy and solid knob tire. Not the best out there, but at that price, it's pretty damn good. AFAIK, they discontinued them - thus the fire sale. Between all the Kenda and INtense tires I've picked up cheap in the last two years, I'm in tires for a while.

My tire preference on my daily driver bikes has developed into:

one of the larger non-dh meats up front, one of the smaller 2.35 Nevegal or Intense DH tires in back.
The DH bike has a DH Kinetics 2.6 in back, and a DH 2.5 Nevegal up front. Works pretty well for me out here. The skinniest I've got are some Intense 2.2 XC4 stuff on the singlespeed. Still stout enough for all the chunky stuff out here, but rolls nice and fast, since that is the "XC" bike.

Yup, Kinetics. They were craZcheap.


+1 to the Excavators. They grip like madd! They roll a little slower if you're using them for XC, but when it comes time to climbing a muddy techy chute...they just grip.

Theres a shortish (25yds) chute that's slightly graded on my local trails that's eroded pretty bad. Cross-rooted, shelfed, slick rocks. When it rains, the nice brown dirt turns to slick silt. I was accustomed to running the 2.35 Nevegal and spinning a bit getting up that chute. My maiden ride on the Excavators was a muddy one and I was freaked out b/c I didn't even slip a tire climbing that silly chute. My riding buddy had just gotten the same tires and when he reached the mouth of the chute, he shouted "OMG dude!!!"

Great meats.

I don't run them on the back of the Komodo b/c the 2.35 Excavator casing is slightly larger than the 2.35 Nevegal casing. I'll be switching back to a Nevegal R / Excavator F when the Conti's give up the ghost fer sure!

Kolossals?

I had a set of Kolossals, they had the profile look of high rollers, but rolled slower than high rollers.

^^ They were truly evil boat anchors. I bought a pair at the NORBA Nats at Schweitzer in '04 or '05 because the guys in the Kenda booth were blowing them out $20 for a pair. Ran them all the next season because they were all I could afford.