Originally Posted by
teachndad
You were right. I went back and remeasured. I read the calipers wrong.
Thanks DJB for the detailed response. I appreciate your time. While I have had experience those many years ago, there's still a learning curve coming back to it. Here I thought 45 psi was low. I will try it down to 35 psi. Clearly we don't want tire fold over on turns. Playing with air pressure is a lot cheaper than buying new tires. I will try that first. It's a good point that I need to settle in on fine tuning my ride set up. BTW, I weigh 145 lbs.
I had a back surgery a few years ago, so I think I am hypervigilant when it comes to the feedback from the road surface. I want to be able to ride as long as I am able.
Cheers,
Rod
I've never had a tire fold over in a turn, but I have felt that funny feeling that the tire is moving around just a bit too much for my liking, and increased pressure slightly to make it feel better.
Again, one riders perception of things can be really different from another, but hopefully by playing with different pressures you'll feel the differences.
As you say, buying new tires can easily "not be cheap", but I certainly can say that different tires can really change how a bike rides. For your specific back issue, going wider and specifically trying some tires that are known to be more "supple", may very well be the game changer for you.
There are a ton of tire options out there, its pretty hard to know what to choose. Some more "supple" tires can be pretty expensive and not last that long, made more for being light, but there are reasonable options out there--you're just going to have to read up a lot on different tires and get opinions on them--though pretty hard to know what opinions to believe.
I guess given your back thing, trying out playing with pressures is a good start, and then you can look into slightly wider tires that can ride nicer.
For me personally, until I got some wider, more supple, nicer rolling tires on sale, I couldn't appreciate the difference. In the end, trying out different tires is part of biking and I guess how much you want to get into it. I have an older friend who has biking comfort issues, but despite telling her for years to try wider, more supple tires, she just isn't interested , mostly because she is not that detail oriented, also because her husband buys X tires and puts them on, and she's fine with that --- but she still has some comfort issues getting older-- so you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
If playing with pressures still ends up with you having comfort problems, slightly wider and more flexible tires would be a help, as would perhaps a flexi stem like the fancy red things.
In the end, I guess its how much you want to play around with stuff and how much things help you. Main thing in the big picture is riding more often and being okay physically with it.
Riding regularly is a great life thing, it's why I still commute, it gets me out regularly and off my arse in a car unless I really do need the car.