Touring/expedition-26" I want some speed and ease of distance on the pavement, but want to be able to go on dirt paths also.
Do I want tread and how much? Do I want high pressure? Slim stuff? How wide do I want to go? What are some tire names and companies to look for?
Thanks-please send me to another thread if there is one-I could'nt find it.

I'm on my third set of tires this year, reason i want the best i can get and i think i found it in schwalble supreams great tire almost like a slick great grip on wet tarmac/ fast/ light.599x1.6 there pretty wide i think this is the smallest you can get but i could be wrong.

As a rule of thumb, the softer the surface you plan to ride, the wider the tire. Heavy lugged tires will suffer on pavement and smooth tires will suffer in mud. Continental and Schwalbe both make touring tires and I'm sure you'll find a host of others. I ride with 1.75" wide Marathon Plus by Schwalbe. If you're on a expedition and you need a tire face it, your going to use what you can get your hands on which may not be the best tire ever but a sound tire is better than no tire. You have to decide where you'll do most of your riding and find a tire that fits the most situations you anticipate yourself being in. My advice is to look for a tire that is a good all rounder like the Travel Contact or one of the Schwalbe's touring tires. The Schwalbes (I think) are expensive to purchase but it's not unheard of to get 10,000 miles out of a set.

Has anyone out there used these? I am sick of flats and not worried about the cost ($30 - 60/tire).

speed and easy rolling=high pressure without deep lugs
"able to go on dirt paths"= is too broad of a criteria without specifying in more detail what kind of path, elevation, conditions. Big difference between packed dirt and loose gravel, wet clay, dust, inclines, etc.
Tire pressure could make up a big part of the difference with one tire covering road and dirt but you have to specify total load on the tires.

Can you specify by percentage what kind of surface you'll be riding on and with what weight? In other words a 1.5" tire might suffice or 2.0" would be minimum, it really helps to be more specific.

I did a tour on 27"x1/4" tires that was 95% on road and 5% on dirt roads, worked great. Now I'm lots fatter and I'd go with the 26"x1.6" Schwalbe Supreme for the same conditions but if it was more on dirt or heavier loads I'd consider something a bit fatter.

Everytire company has something to fit your needs, just specify them a bit more.

ps. there's no reason to have the same tire on the rear as the front. Simply putting a larger tire on the front can make riding on rough roads more pleasant with adjusting the tire pressure providing the difference between dirt and road.

Good point about what kind of dirt. 26x1.25 slicks work for me on packed dirt roads with no trouble. Loose gravel/dust might be a different story.

This is great! Just the kind of stuff I was hoping for.
I'm looking for all around dirt right now-no specific types of soils-I'll mostly ride roads.
How about high vs. low pressure tires?

you are presenting two totally different applications: "all around dirt" or "mostly ride roads"?
and leaving out a very significant factor, the weight on the tires.

If the weight is high and the tires are small the pressure is high, if the weight is low and the tires are large the pressure is low.

If you anticipate sharp rocks/potholes that implies a tire with tougher sidewalls.

Pick the size of tire for your anticipated load and shock absorption then work from there whether you want tough, dirt, or fast rolling.

Here is an interesting piece on tire pressure:
https://www.vintagebicyclepress.com/images/TireDrop.pdf

I don't think you can regulate the tire pressure to make it better for one surface and then another. Every tire is designed to work best at a given tire pressure and then fine tuned for the weight being carried. To lower the pressure in a tire to make it wider and theoretically better in mud I think is somewhat of a myth.

I wasn't speaking of lowering pressure for mud. Nice resource there:

Conclusion

Tire pressures that correspond to 15% tire drop will optimize
your bike’s performance and comfort on average road surfaces. On
very rough roads or unpaved roads, it may be useful to reduce the
pressure. On very smooth roads, increasing the pressure slightly

may improve the performance of your bike

Yes, on both road and mountain. For the road/touring side of things, I really do like the All-Conditions Armadillo 700x28 and they are wide enough for touring IF you don't have a ton of stuff directly on the bike. Harsh ride, long wearing, and an unmistakable shade of red on the sidewalls unless you pay quite a bit more for the Elites which come in all black.

Also... check out the Conti GatorSkin which also comes in a 700x28 size, and has a very nice compliant ride compared to the armadillos. These are actually my favorite road tires, will probably replace my armadillos with a set when they wear out. They also have a new version called a "hard case" or something that I haven't tried.

For a basically un-flat-able, wide, off-road capable but still very streetable tire... go for the Crossroads Armadillo in a 700x38 if you can fit them. I ran a 26" version of this tire on three bikes over the course of 3 years, and now they are on my son's bike with plenty of tread left. The non-armadillo version of this tire has a great ride, is much lighter, and has a bit less flat protection, but is a very good tire.

My wife rides the armadillo nimbus in a 26" and it seems to be a pretty good tire as well.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of threads on tires. Somewhere. But we usually don't mind chiming in each time a new one pops up. The search function on here doesn't seem to be very good.

I found this article very informative about everything wheel related. Tires are in there somewhere. Can't vouch for the accuracy of any of it.

https://www.sentient-entity.toucansur...ng_wheels.html

here you go Jon, this is Thorn bicycles brochure for a 26" Sherpa touring bike with recommended tires. Small tires for light loads and smooth roads, fat tires for heavy loads and rough roads. Between $10 and $70 there's a tire to fit your needs. Pick one for each wheel.


https://www.sjscycles.com/thornpdf/Th...paBroHiRes.pdf

I really like continental travel contact tires.There 26x1.75,have a smooth strip down the center of the tire for rolling on the road and knobbies along the side of the tire for loose dirt.
I ride these tires on both good roads and dirt roads and I have around four thousand miles on them so far and I should get another four thousand miles out of them.

I am really pleased with my Schwalbe Marathon Supremes. Easy rolling, great traction on wet roads, excellent handling, no transition zones while leaned over, good weight capacities, do OK on packed dirt, do fine on gravel, do OK on gras if it's not wet, VERY FLAT RESISTANT, bright reflex sidewall, wearing very well, not cheap.

1.6" is llike a 40mm or above, so should ride pretty decently.....

I'd buy another set - wait a minute - I have another set in the basement.

Thanks for the link. It was interesting but the author gave us a premise and a conclusion but that was it. Where was the testing and how did they come to the conclusion? It really seemed to be lacking. I know this is about touring tires but I installed some Tufo high pressure tires last year on my road bike and had them up to 175lbs. It made the bike feel like I had just installed a new set of high end wheels and felt so much faster but of course the ride was harsher.

+1 on the Travel Contacts. A little heavy but a good compromise and I never flatted with them after several years and two tours. If you can afford it, you couldn't do any better than Schwalbe Extremes, Supremes or Duremes. More dirt and less road=2.0 (all of them). More road and less dirt=1.6 (Supremes).

https://www.vintagebicyclepress.com/i...64TireTest.pdf Here is another article but I don't think this is where the above conclusion came from. All I can say is it comes from people much smarter than me on the subject.

This is copied from Bicycle Quarterly so all the credit and love should go to the authors and BQ as I was just the copy and paster. If you find this interesting, maybe you should look further into a BQ subscription.

BIkearound, hope I didn't sound like I was shooting the messenger. Testing tire rolling resistance and tire pressure sounds so incredibly complicated I wished they would have shared how they came to their conclusion.

BTW, after signing off earlier I did what I did do best which is muck around with bike parts and noticed on a spare Michelin tire, a graph recommending pressure per rider weight. I never saw this on tire packaging before and thought it was coincidental after just looking at the article and graph.