Hello all,

I apologise for my absence, due to the demise of the other touring space, and just general laziness, I have found that my last few tours passed without seeking advice and also not journaling.

I am not sure if the journaling will return, however the time for asking advice has certainly come back around.

My current touring bike is a 2011 Surly LHT, 26" wheeled with XT groupset and v-brakes.

My frustration and envy of others on the road with fancy disc brakes and my ongoing search for the perfect set of handlebars that must not be drop bars lead me to changing bars from Butterfly to Moloko to flat and then finally and most comfortably to Drops. 

However the drop bars are pretty much incompatible with MTB groupsets so I have decided to throw in the towel, stop tweaking things around the edges and go for an all-new bike.

I have settled on a Steel Framed clone of the Disc-Trucker and a 1x12 Gravel/Drop Hydraulic setup, and have most parts ordered and winging their way to me.

The bit where I am now stuck however is in the choice of Tyre. My staple was the Schwalbe Marathon Supreme, offering a good balance of comfort, rolling resistance/lightweight and puncture resistance. However I now find that these are discontinued and have been replaced by a bizarre and endless number of similarly named Marathons. I simply cannot make heads or tails of them all.

So my question to the forum: Best Touring Tyre 700c x 38-40 ish? And why?

Boring answer I know, but I'm getting great use out of the Schwalbe Marathon, and the (slightly modified) Marathon Plus Tour. Obviously your mileage may (literally) vary, but this is the fifth tour I've done on them with not a single puncture! I'm riding 700c x 35 so a little narrower than yours, though I do take them on a lot of gravel and rough tracks.

The Marathon itself is pretty amazing - one nice resource for a "scientific" comparison of the different tyres out there is bicyclerollingresistance.com which also tests puncture resistance. Amazingly, the vanilla Marathons come out as having some of the best rolling resistance, even compared to much lighter tyres! The Marathon plus is course even tougher - the drawbacks I've found with it is (i) they are heavy and stiff and (ii) they can wear very smooth - this doesn't affect their puncture resistance but does reduce grip on mud and gravel. So I'm really liking the Marathon Plus "Tour" variant I got hold of - this is the same as the Plus, but has a chunkier tread and really helps me off-road.

I ride with a plain Marathon on the front and the Plus Tour on the back - I figure the back gets more of a battering, and it's also more of a pain to fix punctures in. I also like the extra grip on driving the back wheel.

Another Supreme fan here Emmet.

Both our Thorn tandem and my Thorn Mercury came with Thorn's stock tyres, Panaracer Paselas. These gave pretty good service but I upgraded to Supremes when they wore out. Anyway I have just fitted a set of Pasela PTs to my ebike conversion, a Merida Speeder 100 as the stock tyres on that bike wore out after 2,000 km  but that was only 150 km ago. You could also look at the Rene Herse range of quality tyres.

You wrote; "So my question to the forum: Best Touring Tyre 700c x 38-40 ish? And why?"

I'm sure you will get many opinions on this, and there are probably many different good tires for touring.  I've tried several and I have my favorite; the Panaracer Tourgard Plus tires.  They come in 38 or 42mm versions for your 700c wheels, and I have had very good experience using the 700x38 tires for my cross-country rambles.  

I've gone coast-to-coast with these tires and had no flats (Northern Tier 2021).  After 4,300 miles of usage on the Northern Tier, I rode on the same tires for the 1,500 miles of the Great Rivers South route.  I also rode the Western Express route in 2017 and enjoyed a flat-free 1,600 mile journey.   Once I complete a major tour I use those tires for my daily rides and training rides on another bike - I have been getting +8,000 miles out of a set of tires, with around half of that being loaded touring and the other half being training rides. 

I typically weigh around 220 lbs and my bike fully loaded for touring with food and water and all the gear tips the scales just over 100 lbs.  So the tires are carrying 320 lbs of bike+gear+rider, and I have found the 38mm size to be just about the "sweet spot" for my needs.  My tours are on paved roads 99% of the time - if I planned a route that involved more gravel or dirt roads I'd go for the 42mm size. 

If you get them, be certain to order the Tourgard Plus tires and not theregular Tour tires - the "plus" designation means they have the inner liner that keeps small thorns and such from penetrating.  I order mine straight from Panaracer USA but you can also get them from dealers.  For $30 per tire I think they are a bargain.   Like all things bicycle-related these days, they can sometimes be hard to get - so I keep a new pair stored inside my house just waiting for my next major tour.  

Good luck with whatever tires you decide to purchase. 

Another thought, some of those Schwalbe puncture resistant tyres are quite heavy and as you are used to Supremes you may not enjoy the ride.

The Panaracers 32 × 622 that I just installed on my e assist only weigh about 300 grammes each according to thedata on the wrapper.

Hi Mike,

that's just the ticket. I shudder at the thought of tyres that approach 1kg each. In my experience it just hasn't been needed for the type of conditions that I need. I am not going on a world tour where I need to get 10K or more from the tyres, and cost while important is not a critical deciding factor - including the cost of replacing them every few years if needed, or if they happen to not be as good as I was hoping.

I've ordered up a couple of them and will see how they go. It will be some time before I know, next tour is not planned till late October, and my new bike prob won't be ready for at least another month, but will report back what I think after my October tour for sure.

Thanks Jon,

I did come across the bicyclerollingresistance website during my search, and thought - what a breath of fresh air, some actual testing results. However it did still leave me scratching my head a bit with all the options. 

Honestly the marathon plus - I have a lot of respect for it but I expect that while doing a 1000m climb I would be in fact cursing it with each pedal stroke...

Thanks George,

I searched for these and did find them but seemed to only find the wired versions which were coming in quite heavy. Given my own Clydesdale proportions it is cheeky I know to fat-shame a tyre but I'm afraid the Marathon Supreme was selected primarily due to its relatively light weight. 

The pasela protites however look to be right up my street. I have ordered a couple and will hopefully not regret it! Regardless, any day on tour is better than a day at the office, even if you are fixing a flat in the cold and rain at the side of the road....

Hi Emmet, I’ll join the chorus and say  Marathon Supreme 26x 1.6" tyres. I toured 3800 km from Canberra to Perth on them and only had about three flats in very testing conditions.

And they still looked ok after almost 4000km, but I did put new tyres on when I returned home.

One of my co-riders (Ian Wallis) uses the leaden Marathon Plus on his Thorn Nomad and he rode back across Australia on his. So he did about 8000 km on one set of tyres. He’s currently riding from Canberra to Singapore. I think he’s only had one flat. He is in Central Java bouncing around on all manner of road surfaces.

Hi Emmet

Don't forget to post pictures of the new bike when it is completed. 

There is a thread on these forums titled "Post your bike"or something similar.