Are 27" and 26" tires getting hard to find?
 

I ask this because I keep seeing claims that the 27" (iso 630) tires will be extinct soon and I'm starting to see the same for 26" tires (iso 559). Is this for real or is it something more like: These parts will be harder to find and may be dropped eventually so maybe start shifting away now.

There are a lot of 26" bikes out there, and they're still being made and sold, so I don't think that tire size will become obsolete anytime soon. Tread choices may become more limited, however.

Depends on what you are looking for. Higher quality folding 26 mtb tires are tougher to find. The selection is hit or miss and I doubt there will be any innovation with the size going forward.

John

Nope...sell some every day and plenty available

26 " tires are still available but just in lesser amounts and the selection is smaller than few years ago...Blame the 27.5 trend for that.

Have you seen this thread?
https://www.bikeforums.net/classic-v...ce-thread.html
I think every 27" tire sold in the last ten years has been listed there.

No I have not and thank you.

fify

No, obviously not has big a selection as 700s, but not hard to find at all online.
Tim

You can still buy single tube tires (yes, that's a thing) and they were only used in America and haven't been fitted to factory bikes since the early 1930s.

There are probably 100,000,000 bicycles in America alone that fit 26" (ISO559) tires. Does it seem reasonable that manufacturers and retailers would turn their back on this market?

If you're talking LBS inventory, then extinct, yes. Online, the selection and availablity of unpopular parts like 27 inch tires has been growing and can be expected to grow. There is definitely no shortage of demand out there, and no reason to expect it to decline. It's fair to say that new bikes don't come with some tire sizes that were popular in the past, but that doesn't spell extinction for parts to support those vintage bikes any more than the '65 Mustang parts market is about to become extinct.

There are probably tens of thousand of tires of those sizes sitting out in LA harbor waiting to be unloaded.

Obsolescence seems to be more of a gray area than a "now it's gone" sort of thing. Once something is no longer the "in" technology or standard, the fanciest or highest-quality versions of those products tend to go away, but the cheap versions will be made as long as there is a buck in it. If the 27" tire thread is representative of that market at large, there is much more demand for the cheap tires anyway...

You did not think your statement through. There are BILLIONS of 26" tired bikes IN USE. There can only be several hundred thousand to a million or two 27.5" tired bikes in use. Which of these two markets are the driver for manufacturers??? The reality is, ALL sizes and types of tires are hard to find right now. Surely that isn't news. When and if supply chain snafus ever get ironed out, ALL sizes and models of tires will return to the national and world markets. Like before, in proportion to the market penetration of the models and types of the bikes that use the corresponding models and types of tires.

Doubt it. Recessions and other disruptions to normal business are used as an occasion to weed out the poorest sellers.

There will be a market for 26” tires for quite a while, but it is no longer a viable size for mountain biking.

You’ll get to choose from what sells the most, not necessarily the best for the application.

John

while 26” is no longer a first-flight MTB size, there’s still some decent tires in production, due to the sheer number of 26” MTBs that are still out there.
It’s also still prevalent in the BMX/dirt-jump sphere, and BMX tires make great rolling stock for the townie/path-bike roles that a lot of older MTBs get “retired” to.

The vast majority of those 26" bikes in existance already will never see a new tyre fitted, or if they do it'll be the cheapest one they can find at the time.

So whilst it's always going to be possible to buy a tyre that fits, you're going to get less choice of good ones as more and more of the better and newer bikes are 27.5 or 29". It's already hard to find good new bikes with 26" wheels.

I get what you're saying, but the folks with top-quality 26" wheel bikes will fit new tires and will expect quality. The remaining excellent 26" tires will sell well enough to remain available.

My bikes with 27" wheels roll recently purchased, beautiful, top-quality German and Japanese tires.


https://cimg5.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...da593ad5dc.png

Maybe if the obsolete 559 tires get tough to find, it'll trigger some company like Compass to sell some high-quality tires in that cachet size. Then, maybe after a while, more people will discover the tires and change wheels just to use those tires. I mean, it's smaller than 584, so it could allow fatter tires to be used. Heck, it might even cause the whole industry to mover over to that size!

That is my point. You can always take your Yo Eddy or Bontrager Race Lite, mount a kids seat on the back, and take to the MUP. Those tires will always be there.

But at that point it really isn’t a mtb.

John

Does anyone ever worry about not being able to buy tubulars anymore?

They do and he had a bike built around them

Whilst there's enough demand for them, sure. But eventually they'll get rare and expensive, and companies will dedicated production facilities to better selling products.

I'm also not sure how many folk with top quality 26" wheel bikes will stick with 26" indefinitely. Should they trash the bike, would they get another 26" or would they change size to something like a 27.5 or 27.5+? Are there many disciplines where people are still using 26" at the top end?

I recently had a tough time finding a 29 x 3" tire. None of the bike shops in my town had any and most online distributors were out of stock on that size. I do think we're going to have supply chain issues for quite awhile.

What was more frustrating was my web search brought up tons of tires sizes that were not 29 x 3. Web pages were written in such a way that I had to click on the link to find out the available sizes. I either need to learn how to do a better search or maybe chose a different search engine. I believe the same is probably true with 26 and 27 inch tires. They're out there, but a web search pulls up so many hits that don't apply it's hard to find the valid hits.

It is getting harder to find 27" tires, but you should be able to find them.