Bicycle Mechanics - road tire vs. mtn tire effiency?

hi,
we're planning on riding over 100 miles for a trip, and i've wanted to change the tires of my mtn bike with road tires. Everyone seems to say it makes a great difference. I haven't tried road tires before, and was wondering if anyone can mayb give me statistics for how much more effecient road tires r? is it really that much more effecient? i'm looking at getting 1-3/8 wide tires.. is that too thin? i'm riding on 2.1 mtn bike tires right now

Thanks in advance

You will be 56.753% faster on slicks. Or is that 22.544%. I forget sometimes. It will make a noticable differance. A few MPH is pretty common.

The big advantages of road tyres are their smoother profile and higher pressure. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the change from offroad tyres.

I went from a standand hybrid tire on my Trek 7500 to a thinner road tire and absolutely notice a marginal difference.

When I did that ten years ago I got 1.4" Tom Slicks. It's big enough to be cushiony but not so heavy. I think it's a good size. WHile you will go faster, the real surpise is the way you can rack up more miles. You can cruise at a reasonable speed without serious effort.
I went from a very knobby tire to slicks; and noticed a huge difference.

I bought a set of 1.25" Specialized Fatboy slicks for road training. I put 80 lbs of air in them and they are amazing! Massively more efficient than knobbies :) .

I just swapped ritchie magabites with tom slicks and its like another bike. The 2.0 to 1.4 must help but the smooth versus railroad tie ride is very nice on the street. Seems faster and as others mentioned less tiring than off road treads.

Yes the real secret is not the width as much as it is the tread pattern. I use a set of Conti "Traffic" tires that are 2 inch wide. They have a very tight pattern of squares to make them more ROAD like than the mud-tires most mountain bikes use. They do not roar like mud-tires... And I can easily do 20-25mph on my mountain bike.

As far as width... Yes it does make a difference but is marginally less compared to tread. More over tread width tends to control the weight of the tire which can also become a difference in racing... A 180g 20mm tire can be a big advantage to a 560g 28mm tire!!! (times two that's an additial pound of weight!)

everyone knows that road tires are more efficient than mountain bike tires.

Watch the rudeness

ed get lost. everyone knows that road tires are more efficient than mountain bike tires. u stupid newbie. lolPot calling the kettle black methinks. By the way it's "you" not "u" Internet shorthand is against Forum Guidelines. (http://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=22263&highlight=forum+guidelines)
More specicfically
Disruption... Posts which intend to disrupt the topic of conversation or steer the topic away from the focus of the forum and related news. Disruption can include harassment, multiple user profiles, multiple posting of the same post and posting completely off topic messages. Please do your best when it comes to grammar, punctuation and spelling. Consistent use of "AOL'ese" and "hAx0r" talk can be very disruptive.

So here's my two cents.

I switched from some unnamed knobbies to some Michelin WildGripper Rocks. More of a semi-slick, tight checerkboard like pattern. I saw about a 2-3 mph increase in my average on my 30 mile standard loop.

One thing to watch for when using a thinner tire is the width of the tire vs the width of the rim. I know a lot of people have professed good results with matching up really thin tires on MTB rims.

I prefer to live within the constraints published on Sheldon site.

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/tire-sizing.html

Some more tire info


http://www.sheldonbrown.com/tires.html