Tara On Tire Width | Bicycling’s Stand Up - video Dailymotion

Bicycling's Tara Seplavy gives her take on tire width.

Transcript

00:00People have been going with water tires on their road bikes. I just did a

00:04complete rundown of all the different tires that you might want to put in your

00:10road bike. You know, everywhere from a 25 up to a 28 and did a little bit of a

00:15ride comparison. So to determine what size tire is going to fit in your bike,

00:20it's not based off of what is written on the side of the tire, the label there.

00:26Use that as a really rough guide, but chances are it's going to measure out to

00:32be a little bit wider than the printed size on there. So what you're going to

00:36do, just go get a tape measure, get a ruler, measure up, look in the frame at the

00:40narrowest point and go, all right, what size is it? This here, this one measures to

00:44about 45. That doesn't mean I can go and fit a 45 millimeters higher in my bike.

00:49ISO standard is to have four millimeters of clearance on each side. I like to kind

00:55of bump that up a little bit, maybe go five, six millimeters of clearance. That's

00:59not just to the clearance of your frame. If you've got fenders on your bike, you

01:03have a front derailleur, look at where all the different touch points might be. If a

01:08tire hits any of that, rubs through your frame, rubs through your fender, rubs

01:12through your derailleur, it's going to cost you a lot of money, a lot more money

01:15than the tire. So put on narrow tire. Now ISO standard, rule of thumb is take that

01:21standard, bump it up, okay, five millimeters per side, a little more than the standard.

01:27That's going to give you 10. Say this was 45, you can probably comfortably fit a 35

01:33millimeter wide tire in there. Should probably be okay, might be a little tight. That is

01:38probably your best guideline is to look at the actual width of your frame compared to

01:44the tire that you're going to put in there.