Choosing The Right Tyre Pressure | What Tyre Pressure Should I Run?

today we are going to talk about getting the right tire pressure uh maximizing your tire pressure if you like now this is probably the most influential thing that you can do on your bike and it's absolutely free to experiment with you're just being air in your tyre or releasing some and it has the single biggest effect on how your bike performs off-road even more so than suspension initially your tires are that contact patch between your bike and the ground it's a free performance enhancing thing to play with so i suggest you do and we're going to talk about tires okay first up we'll talk about some units of measurement uh in particular the psi or the bar that you might be putting into those tyres now i'm aware that a lot of european riders will be referring in bar uh whereas in north america perhaps and uk certainly we use psi in general as pounds per square inch uh in this video i'm going to use psi it's just what i'm familiar with uh sorry if that's not quite where you are but just for your reference out there one bar is approximately 14 and a half psi now the first thing you need to take into account is how different your tyres are and your rim widths are these are all significant not only to the shape of your tyre and how it performs but the tire pressures that you're going to be able to use now there's no fixed rule but the general rule of thumb is a thinner tire you need a thinner rim for it and a fatter tire you need a fatter rim for it this is both on the fatter tyre and that you're going to need a rim that's wide enough to support that and on the thinner end uh if you were to have say a 2.2 tyre with a 35mm rim you're actually going to make the profile of the tyre so square you'll end up having you'll increase the rolling resistance so you're going to change the characteristics of that tyre so it is appropriate to have the right size tire for your rims now give or take if you're going to have a 2.2 tire on your bike you probably want to be looking at something say around a 25 mil rim if you're going to go up to like 2.3 probably 28 to 30 mil somewhere around that region anything like above 2.5 2.6 you start creeping above the 35 mil rim territory there now for example on my bike behind i've got rim that measures 30.5 mil internal about 35 mil externally with a 2.4 tire now this makes the tire probably slightly squarer than it would be on a slightly narrower end but i really like that so the tire design is fairly round so it's not really hampered that but it really like accentuates that shoulder edge you get a real good shoulder to calf but just to demonstrate for example just holding this piece of carcass here now this is a 2.35 carcass if you were to run a narrow rim on this you're actually going to end up solving the more teardrop profile to the tire so you're actually going to not get the most out of the tire and you're going to actually change the characteristics from what the designer originally intended and the opposite could be said if you're running a really wide rim if you max this out it's going to end up being far too square and as i said you're going to have the entire surface of the tyre in contact with the ground instead of just the main central tread so you're going to be adding rolling resistance uh i it's going to roll slower you're also going to have a very angular corner on there so really important to get the correct width rim or the correct size tire to suit the width of your rims the next thing to take into account when experimenting with tire pressure is your actual hardware itself the tyres now you're going to get different configurations and styles of tyres to suit different styles of riding and accordingly you'll run them very differently now for example a cross country tyre will likely have 120 tpi casing which is very fine threads which means the tire carcass can be very thin and very supple because of that the tyre won't have a great amount of support so a lighter rider arguably will get more out of a tie like this because i have the freedom of experimenting with tire pressure a heavier rider like myself i'm around 90 kilos so on a tire with 120 tpi casing that's very fine like a cross-country race tire i actually end up having to run at nearly 30 psi in the tires to get the tyre to have enough support but thankfully because that casing is so fine and supple it will actually feel like a heavier juicier tyre at perhaps about 28 psi so you do need to take these things into account now again the opposite can be said if you were to run a tie with an extremely thick sidewall so this has an enduro casing i'm just using this cut up sample here just as a thing to reference because it's so much thicker it's like a dual ply carcass eventually it's got four layers of rubber wrapped around there you've got so much support on this so accordingly you can run this a lot lower pressure and not lose that all-important support and stability the downside of this if you're to run these at a higher pressure you really do lose out on the field you're never going to have the feel of running a thinner tire at higher pressure when i say thinner tire i mean the actual carcass not the physical width but then goes the actual width of the tires the thinner the tyre the firmer the pressure the wider the tyre the lower the pressure which is why you see fat bike tyres which can be anything up to five inch you can run those as low as seven psi so the hardware itself is very important but a good way to get a guideline with your tyres is to refer to the sidewalls on them so as i said before this one says between 20 and 40 psi now that's a massive range of adjustment but they're telling you a minimum and a maximum so at least you get a ballpark to start with the next thing to take into account is your body weight um or the system weight which would be you in your riding gear perhaps with a bag carrying water and stuff and the weight of your bike it all has a big effect on the weight of the tyre now you can't just put 30 psi in your tires and expect them to work in all conditions with whatever you're doing because the aim in the game here unlike in the road world where generally a firmer pressure is going to roll faster a firmer pressure on an off-road bike unless you're running in very smooth conditions isn't actually a good thing will actually make you go slower because what happens in a firmer conditions is when you hit small items like roxanna the tyre will skip over them don't forget it's your first point of contact with the ground if you're running a lower pressure that tire can deform and it can conform to the ground yeah if the tire is rolling on the ground rather than bouncing up in the air your full momentum is going to be better that's why it's so important to get the correct tire pressure now the heavier rider you are generally the more tired pressure you're gonna have to have and of course probably the heavier duty tyres you're gonna have to have uh to give you the support that you need now i weigh in a realm of about 90 kilos give or take and my preferred type pressure tends to be around 24 psi on a sort of a trail spectre like this and on the rear probably about 26 and i'll probably vary a couple of psi either way depending on if i'm running in wet conditions where i need all the traction possible or super dry conditions for example riding to work i commute on this bike as well i'll actually run the tyres nearly 30 psi just to make them roll as quick as possible obviously just on tarmac but i would never run them like that off-road but this is a cool thing with tires you can chop and change this stuff constantly but it's good to know a good ballpark setting you can work from nonetheless now just a few notes to take into account what the types of trail conditions you're likely to face as i said with a firmer and smoother trail condition you could get away with running a firmer tire pressure if you're running a particularly rocky place yes you do need grip but if it is for example flint and shale and things like that they're quite likely to slash through tire casings so you probably want to run a little bit firmer than you might usually run the opposite can be said if you're running rooty terrain or perhaps muddy terrain but you want the maximum grip possible but mud is a very specialist thing and we're very good at this here in the uk because it seems to be all we have even even then you don't run a single pressure when you're running in winter mud conditions many people would just think oh you need to run your tire pressure as low as possible to get the biggest spread possible sometimes that's not necessarily the case you actually will want to run a firmer type pressure in order for the tyres to cut through the mud in order to find the grip and the harder base underneath and again the width of the tyre comes into play here i think in a cycle across world they'll be running tiny little tires and they can get insane amounts of grip because those tyres are cutting through the mud not suggesting anyone should run drop bars on a mountain bike or do anything that ridiculous but you might want to consider if you're running in wet and muddy conditions a lot actually having a different tyre just for those conditions because it's very unlike anything else that you tend to ride in get yourself a tire pressure gauge it doesn't matter if it's an analog one or a digital one but get that and use that to refer to your tire pressures now most pumps whether it's a floor standing pump sometimes known as a track pump or a mini pump will have a gauge on of some kind and they will all vary slightly i bet if you have three different pumps and you check your tire pressure with them you'll be slightly different on all of them so just use the tyre gauge so whatever you're inflating your tire with wherever you are you can get an accurate reading and find what you like a little tire gauge works wonders i've got this little tiny digital one from topek i've had this in years it's a brilliant piece of kit it's completely accurate and it enables you to get a real good feel of what your tyres are doing the most surprising thing about experimenting with these is noticing the fact that you will probably be able to notice the difference in one or two psi between inflating your tyres it makes a big difference another good reason for carrying one of these with you is depending on where you ride let's say for example you're you're going on an alpine mountain biking holiday tire pressure is affected by altitude but also the temperature out there in very cold conditions your tyres can feel quite soft in very warm conditions they can feel firmer like it's really dramatically effective we're talking about a couple of psi difference here so it's well worthy adding one of these to your tool kit now just to help you on your way uh with some reference points for tire pressures we're going to run you through what we run here at gmbn on a couple of our typical bikes on the trail bike i run trail casing on my tyres and i don't run inserts generally on there i'm 90 kilos my tires are 2.4 i like to run 24 psi in the front and 26 in the rear uh of course like i said that will vary and now let's see what the other gym being guys run right hey guys yeah finally just got back from a filthy ride and got the bike cleaned up so you can check it out now this is one of my enduro bikes it's an ober occum lt 150 at the back and i've got it at 160 on the front now my tyre setup on here is well i've got it dialed over the years i'm six foot tall or 183 centimeters and 81 kilograms in weight and i'm running vittoria mazza trails front and rear that's the trail casings now i will go up to an enduro casing a thicker casing should the track dictate but for the way i ride and how i like them to feel i go for the trail casings they're 2.4 and will often sometimes be a 2.6 on the front but two fours all the way around at the mo tire pressures is 23 at the front 25 at the back psi and there's always an insert at the back because i i run them paired up to the uh spank aluminium rims but i always run an insert just because the back takes all the bangings when you're manually through and power and through stuff pressures i am a pretty standard guy i've never reached them i run 28 psi in the rear 26 up front i know that's quite hard but i'd rather have it a bit too hard and just have it so the tide doesn't squirm i hate that feeling of a tyre if it's a bit soft it can feel really nice have a little bump so when you push it hard it's like a berm or a compression that squirm when you might not even burp it just moves i hate that feeling well quite surprising range of tire pressures there amongst us hopefully this has been helpful for you and i'm sure one of us will give you some sort of guideline specs there uh to try yourselves at home i'd love to know what type of pressures you've settled on or if you've not uh are you going to go out and get yourself a tire gauge i strongly urge you to because it's free traction once you've got one of those things honestly it's brilliant uh hopefully the video has been helpful for you let us know what you think in the comments underneath and we'll see you in the next one tara

Channel: GMBN Tech

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Id: OHr3p-eh1JE

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021