Are studded tires effective on packed snow?
 

From what I am reading , studded tires are designed for ice. How about snow and packed snow? Mainly I ride on the road which often has 1/2" of packed snow from cars after a snowfall.

They are generally knobby for loose snow with studs for ice. I found summer tires fine for packed snow. It was only when I hit ice I thought was snow that I got upside down and went to buy studs.

I'm a rookie myself but I find a couple inches of unplowed and rutted snow the major problem. Or over 6 inches of fresh snow.

Ideal in hardpack snow. The cookie dough chudder on the roads: nothing works well.

+1

I love riding on hardpack. It quiets the studs and it feels fast.

And there seems to be no relief from that crap this year on the streets near my house. Seriously this is the worst winter for riding I've had since I started about 4 years ago. I feel like a rookie.

hard packed is truely ideal for studded, but less so if it's rutted with foot prints.

actually the worst kind of snow to deal with is deep powder.

That hard packed snow will be solid ice after the first sunny day. You'll be glad if you have studs then.

Studs work marvellously on hardpack. Good tread works pretty well in small amounts (an inch or so) of loose snow of any kind. 3,7 inch Endomorphs are the only tire which works at all in deep powder or car crap.

Damn straight!

The Nokian 106 have larger knobs than the Schwalbe, which might be a bit better in the chudder.....

The harder it's packed the better. With melting and refreezing like Roody says, they are fantastic.
The studs need something hard like ice to penetrate and to grab, if there is only soft snow the studed tires are about the same as knobbies.

Fat soft studded tires, compared to thin narrow studded tires, help too.

The roads where I live become very packed. The plows come sometimes a day or two after the storm.
Cars make the snow almost glacial. So hard that the plows can't scrape it all off until the salt starts working.
With the studs this hard pack is fast and I feel secure at speed. Without studs I have been on my butt.
This is my first set of studded tires and I still have much to learn. (I bought the first pair that I found at the LBS)
After three weeks of riding the Innova tire studs are showing wear from a relatively small amount of pavement.
How soon the studs will become ineffective is yet to be seen. Maybe I can replace the studs with carbide, although haven't found any yet. A bag of 100 standard replacement studs are about $20 online.
Spend the extra $20 and get tire with better (Carbide) studs fright from the start as it is hard to resist riding on the asphalt.

They worked really well on my ride today. Here's crummy cellphone shot of the trail conditions, typical New England thaw/refreeze fim on the trail with death crust off the sides.


http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v2...k/IMG_0241.jpg