Originally Posted by
moverton
I have a 2016 Domane 4 disc. It came with 25mm road tires. I sometimes ride on packed gravel rails to trails and would like to figure out if I can swap in more appropriate tires. I asked the local trek store and they didn't really seem to know if it would take 28's. Seems weird that trek doesn't publish specs. The guys at the shop didn't give me much confidence they knew what they were talking about.
Or maybe there is an option staying at 25mm which would be better on mixed surfaces???
Anyone have experience with wider tires on this bike. I'm fairly new to the whole nice bike area so if I need to provide more info about the current setup, let me know.
28 mm tires are not only better for gravel but for most road uses as well in California. Most of the roads are now so beat up that the bike spends most of the time bobbing up and down rather than going in a straight line. I was pretty surprised at how much faster I went on 28's than 23's. Thinking like an idiot I went to 25's tubeless and lower pressure which worked well until you got a flat that wouldn't seal. I'm now back to clincher 28's and I might add I'm also returning to aluminum wheels that actually brake well. I got used to the poor braking of carbon until I got a set of deep aluminum rims. They are great except they are "tubeless also" which means terribly hard to change tires. If I'm out in the middle of nowhere I prefer to be able to fix a flat and when I'm dropping down the steep side of Palimares I want to be able to just touch the brakes. Growing older I'm now more aware of all of the things that can go wrong. So i tend to descend a LOT slower than I used to. Nothing like a few high speed crashes such as from a flat in a fast descending turn to make you keep the speed down to the level at which you have a decent chance of controlling the bike if one of these unknowns raises its ugly head. I'm not a pro racer for which speed is everything. I'm fast enough that in the last metric century I did I finished 800 out of 2500. So I'm not going to complain about my speed at 75 years if age. I'm more concerned about how I will train for the late year metrics if they don't shove this lockdown where the sun doesn't shine pretty quickly.
The one advantage of disks is that you don't wear out wheels like rim breaks. But that doesn't make you immune to cracking around the spokes or spoke breakage If you have deep carbon rims you're pretty safe from the rim breaking but if you're carrying fairly a shallow wheels like gravel wheels, carbon wheels can break from disk brake pressures. Remember that disk brakes put loads in the wrong places on a bicycle structure. Bikes like the Domane can strengthen the regions that are worst stressed by the disk braking but they don't make the spokes stronger.