Shopping today for the Baconator. It came to me with some tires labeled Serfas Pacer Meo Series. These tires are positively coated in make-no-mistake markings about size and pressure molded into the sidewall, including the original brand Chao Yang and a lot of Chinese characters that I guess translate into the English stuff. Two mystery markings are H-424 which might be a tread pattern and 70kg which must be a load limit. I measured them out at only 27mm even though they are marked 27 x 1-1/4 and also 32-630. FWIW the tire tread is identical to the Kenda Klassics Street K135. They have longitudinal cracking in the sidewall rubber in the tan by the black boundary. Time to shop, right?

I looked at Universal, BTD, and Performance. (and Swift.) It seems like the Panaracer made tires (including Swift) and the Continentals are still the best things going.

Connie has Gator Skins, Gator Hardshells, Ride Tour commuter tire, and Super Sport Plus in several sizes. The Hardshells are the only folders - cruel irony! The Ultra Sport is sometimes folding but not in the 27 size. I can find it in stock some places.

There's a folding Pasela Pro-Tite x3 sizes, and the Swift. Paselas and Pasela pro-tites in wire bead x3 sizes

I was not impressed with the prior model Zaffiro that I got a few years ago and the current one looks no better. It's only like the premium tire in name. twenty seven TPI

There is a Michelin branded tire - viva la France! - but it looks Walmart quality

Tom didn't mention it when he linked them above but the latest version of the Marathon is an eco-fair-trade tire. Everything about it is supposed to be sustainable or recycled. The former version is still listed and they have a budget tire called Road Sport.

Lots of cut and paste errors in tire specifications on the vendor websites

Tire list is now updated in post 381

Got a pair of these on Ebay. I like the tread design better than some others. Good price, nice ride quality.

^^ Those Urban Max would look good on a bike with yellow lettering! They are not in the 2024 catalog, though. Not every tire appears in manufacturer catalogs. Some of them are probably not "printed" every year and some of them are sort of below-premium. Kenda had no 27" tires on its website but there are a lot for sale

I think this fad has nearly died out but you can still find them:

The Chao Yang labeled Serfas that looks like the Kenda came in at 539 on my kitchen scale. They really are that heavy. Where do they put it all?

On very close examination of online listings the treads are subtly different. Clones, not relabel. The Kenda left, the Serfas right. There's a CST that's yet another example. Also saw versions labeled Giant Bikes and Ultracycle Ten Speeder. Popular style!

Update. I don't expect to maintain this, but I felt bad leaving out some that are current right now.

Darth Lefty thanks for this. It’s very helpful.

Public Service Announcement!

Do NOT buy the Kenda K184 27x1-3/8" tires. Worse tires I have ever owned. I built up an old Peugeot mixte as my main city bike, and with much anticipation rode it for weeks with these tires. It was slow and difficult, and taught me what rolling resistance means. On top of them being a literal drag to ride I started to realize both tires were out of round, to the point of feeling a bump every revolution once I became aware of it. Absolute crap quality.

I swapped them out for Schwalbe Marathons and I now can ride 2 cogs higher with less effort. Now the bike is great, just what I expected. I've built a dozen+ of these old mixtes so I know what they feel like with good tires and wheels.

And if you're thinking it's the extra width, that's not it. I rode a Raleigh with Michelin World Tour 26x1-3/8" for the last couple of years and really like the feel of the bike with those fatter tires. That's why I tried it on the Peugeot.

Looked up the Kenda tire. The tread pattern shows that it's clearly meant for mainly off-road use. (Unlike, for example the Michelin World Tour tire, whose name indicates that it's optimized for use on paved roads.)

So the Kenda K184 is a less than ideal choice for paved-road use. Just as any tire designed for use on dirt/rocks/mud would be.

So, yes, avoid buying that Kenda tire for commuting or most kinds of road cycling.

It's common for tires to appear to be out of round, but they almost always seat properly after reducing the pressure to 15 psi or so, applying some non-oil-based lubricant (e.g., dish-washing liquid) between the hook of the rim and the tire bead, and carefully reinflating.

Sometimes it takes three or four attempts, but the low spots usually end up popping into place, eventually.

Could be you got a couple of duds, but their quality control procedures have to be pretty good, considering that they manufacture over half a million tires and tubes every day.

There are tires that work fine once seated, and there are those which still exhibit lumps or squiggles even after being properly seated and I have had my share of Kenda tires like that and I repped for a company that sold Kenda tires. Had some come back from dealers and had a couple that I bought for myself that turned out bad. Luck of the draw.

Yeah Kenda and CST can be like that.

I'm better off with Continental or Panaracer.

There have been previous threads suggesting that Continental's tire quality can vary. Perhaps some batches of their tires have had problems over the years.

Myself, I trust tires from companies like Kenda and Cheng Shin that produce hundreds of millions of tires yearly to be reliable. Think of all the OEM tires on both bike store bikes and big box bikes.

Especially the latter. The manufacturers of bottom-feeder bikes are impressively creative about coming up with ways to cheapen the parts on their bikes, but posts complaining about the quality of those bikes never include mentions of the tires failing under normal use, as far as I can recall.

That's a fair point, Trakhak, and in the world of manufactured goods made by high-volume makers, there is always a non-zero and finite amount of risk. (I'm wearing my engineer hat now.) Every company produces defects, and the rate of defects is not knowable. I used to deal in large volumes of computers so I had a bigger sample than most people, by far. I would hear anecdotes about this brand or that brand being either better or worse than the others, and I usually kept my mouth shut because some people don't understand the significance of sample size.

And even when I'm being scientific about it, I'll still have biases from my experiences. And that leads me to prefer certain companies over others, whether it's fair or not.

In 27" tires, we still have good choices but not nearly as many as with other sizes.

Many folks won’t read through 16 pages of very good information and opinions. In a nutshell

If you don’t have hooked rims, you need wired tires.
Folding tires ride smoother than wired tires.
A nice tire will list for much more than 20 bucks.

I also looked at what the K184 is and it seems to be an economical tire first. Second it would be utility oriented. For recreational riding this may be less desirable. If you have a grocery getter, pub bike or beater, this could be an option. I like the Kenda K35 for a more budget oriented build. I have two bikes with them and they have been good.

I'm with Tom aka noglider, Continental or Panaracer are the better tires choices for 27" (630) rims. I have heard good things about the Michelin tires but I haven't tried them.

If you want more width there are the Sand Canyon tires which made by Panaracer and are 1-3/8" wide, but I have heard that they are not much wider than the Panaracer Pasella's. Kenda also has a couple more 1-3/8" tires that may be better than the K184's. There is a Kross Cyclo tire and a K40.

Thanks, Velo Mule. I don't see many Michelin bike tires in the US anymore. They were always a really good maker. I've seen the high end racing tires in recent years but that's about it.

Again:

The problem with the Kenda model the OP complained about wasn't that it was in any way inferior. It was that, as a tire with a tread designed for (moderately rough) off-road trails, it was the wrong tire for the OP's predominantly paved-road use.

Hammering home the point: a 25-mm-wide Continental GP5000 is not a bad tire. But it would be a bad choice for riding rough trails.

I agree that Continental tires have a deservedly high reputation for quality. But it wouldn't be surprising if their tires had more of a problem with quality control than Kenda.

Why?

Continental is a big player in the racing and enthusiast market. Thus, they're obliged to update and innovate more or less constantly. New designs, new machinery, new assembly procedures: problems are bound to arise from time to time with any such business, as noglider pointed out in a recent post where he gave us a glimpse of his hard-won knowledge of quality control issues (and non-issues).

Kenda, in comparison, has no real presence in that market.

(They do produce some high-end tires, at least for mountain bikes, but that's likely a perfunctory effort, representing a felt need to maintain a presence at races by sponsoring some riders or teams.)

So, to serve their bread-and-butter slice of the market, they've cranked out pretty much the same tires in the same (gigantic) numbers for decades. Whatever QC problems they might have seen (and caught) with those models have long since been erased.

So I'll happily buy Continental tires for my racier bikes, but I'll just as happily, and maybe just a bit more confidently, buy cheap Kenda tires for the Cannondale hybrid I've been doing most of my miles on for the last five years.

Well put, Trakhak! I got the well-recommended Schwalbe Delta Cruiser tires for my English 3-speed, and for whatever reason, they rode like rocks. I replaced them with Kenda K40 tires, and they were great. Ya nevah know. I am a tire nerd so I treat myself when I can. I have 32 mm GP 5000 tires on my commuter bike which is overspending on tires that won't last many miles. They get punctures because I want a tire that rides nicely more than a tire that doesn't get punctures. I'm fine with that, but I'm weird.

I haven't had tires fail on the road from defective manufacturing. It does happen, though not often. I had CST tires that would not seat properly. They looked just like tires I had had many years early from a factory in Japan. Maybe CST took the old molds or just the design. But the exact size of the bead was slightly off. And I'm sure this happens with the established brands, too. Which brands does it happen more frequently with? I don't know. I have my impressions, but I don't have a big sample size.

And country of manufacture is not a great predictor. Continental oversees the making of tires in many places. They save the German manufacturing for the high price tires. I bet the Chinese- or Malaysian-made tires with the Continental badge are good. An analogy: Apple specifies how well to make their computers in China, and the result is a low defect rate. Manufacturing is a manageable process, especially when customers are willing and able to pay enough.

I’ve had reasonable luck with the venerable Kenda K35 over the years. It has the classic look that seems appropriate on my Schwinn SuperSport that was my only bike for decades. I wasn’t really much of an enthusiast then, and pumped them up to 85 lbs on the non hooked Weinmann rims and never had one blow off. I didn’t know any better, but now I ride with 60-65 lbs. They look the part for a stock looking build, but if I’m going for ride quality, it is always Paselas now. I also have many more bikes now, but restored one to remind me of my past.

Nice Super Sport sd5782 right down to the tires and toe straps. The Kenda K35 appear to be "inspired" by the Schwinn LeTour tire that was Schwinn's 1-1/4", better tire offering. At this time Schwinn was loosing sales to lighter weight bikes. One of the moves that Schwinn made to counter that is to get good riding tires with lower rolling resistance made (or perhaps the tires already existed and they just put the Schwinn label on it) and publish results so that they could show that even with a little more heft, their bikes rolled easier. Both the Letour and the 1-1/8" Super Record tire had a raised center on the tire tread. You still see this and the same tread pattern on the Kenda K35's. From my memory the Kenda K35 and the Schwinn LeTour tire look like the same tire. Or it could just be inspired by the LeTour.

Not saying this to be disagreeable, but I've been riding 50+ years, and have ridden many tires on many bikes with many tread patterns. Those are not off-road tires to me. I might put them in the hybrid category, if I had to. I've ridden plenty of tires on the road with similar tread. I've ridden 2" knobbies on the road with less resistance. The pattern is not the problem, imo. These will be the first set I've out and out rejected.

Do they have thick puncture protection incorporated under the tread? That single factor has killed any semblance of responsiveness in any such tire I've ridden.

But I willingly put up with the dead, sluggish feel of puncture protection during my 20 years of commuting by bike in the hope of ensuring that I wouldn't have to fix a flat during a commute, especially under freezing conditions.

By the way, I looked up that tire model, and the main source I see is Ali Express. Who sells those tires in the U.S.?.

The biggest problem with cheap 27" tyres is that most of them have a rib in the centre.

So when you lean over it falls off the rib and the feel/grip/response changes, quite disconcerting.

I finally threw in the towel on my Weinmann 27" x 1-1/4" rims, Velox rim tape, and Conti Ride Tour tires. Blisters on both thumbs. Bruised ego. May have broken a bone and torn a tendon or two. Not sure. TWO Conti tubes punctured in the fog of tire war. I had left the tires in the mechanical closet all night (with the furnace) and used the hair dryer on them today. No dice. I've cursed a few tires in my day, but never lost resoundingly to one. Not my proudest moment.

Yeah. I could have changed out the Velox. I think it's the only hack I didn't try, but ... I like Velox.

I've ordered the Kool-Stop Tire Bead Jack (and two new tubes), and will regroup, lick my wounds, question every single one of my life choices, and try to mount the Ride Tours again in the year 2026 :-)

Schwalbe 27-inch tires on sale at Western Bikeworks (aka biketiresdirect.com).

https://www.westernbikeworks.com/pro...1-4-tire-hs484

I've no experience with them, just passing along the sale info.