About those tires that attract magnets I wrote about the other day.
Oddly cheap from overseas retailers,
oddly delivered in an unfolded state without a box,
oddly heavy in weight, and oddly difficult to seat the bead onto the rim—
this turned out to be a steel bead tire.
These are adopted to cut costs during complete bike assembly.
Since the only Japanese wholesaler handling Continental doesn't stock this specification, I'd written before that if it's not a leftover from a complete bike, you can assume it came from overseas retail, and that turned out to be exactly the case.
When I swapped both front and rear wheels with the Rubino Pro G2.0 we were selling at a special price,
it achieved close to 100g of weight savings per tire.
Just to be clear, this doesn't mean the Rubino is unusually light by itself.
Years ago, about 15 years back,
Schwalbe had a tire called the Lugano,
and the steel bead version of that was a stock item at Japanese wholesalers.
The actual market price was an astounding 980 yen per tire.
When I looked it up recently, it's now called the Lugano (not Lugano),
and the successor model Lugano 2 is only available in Kevlar bead specification
at a list price of 2,400 yen before tax.
With that old Lugano, even used ones that had seen some mileage—
when you pressed your thumb pad against it, your fingertip would turn white and grip... no, actually your fingertip would just slide right forward.
Plus, the texture felt more like plastic than rubber,
and when you splashed water on it, it beaded up perfectly—a mysterious material,
and it was dangerously slippery on manhole covers and braille blocks.
Very sketchy stuff indeed.
Apparently in China there's something called fake tapioca made from old tire rubber,
so maybe there's also fake tires made from tapioca on the flip side.
Oddly cheap from overseas retailers,
oddly delivered in an unfolded state without a box,
oddly heavy in weight, and oddly difficult to seat the bead onto the rim—
this turned out to be a steel bead tire.
These are adopted to cut costs during complete bike assembly.
Since the only Japanese wholesaler handling Continental doesn't stock this specification, I'd written before that if it's not a leftover from a complete bike, you can assume it came from overseas retail, and that turned out to be exactly the case.
When I swapped both front and rear wheels with the Rubino Pro G2.0 we were selling at a special price,
it achieved close to 100g of weight savings per tire.
Just to be clear, this doesn't mean the Rubino is unusually light by itself.
Years ago, about 15 years back,
Schwalbe had a tire called the Lugano,
and the steel bead version of that was a stock item at Japanese wholesalers.
The actual market price was an astounding 980 yen per tire.
When I looked it up recently, it's now called the Lugano (not Lugano),
and the successor model Lugano 2 is only available in Kevlar bead specification
at a list price of 2,400 yen before tax.
With that old Lugano, even used ones that had seen some mileage—
when you pressed your thumb pad against it, your fingertip would turn white and grip... no, actually your fingertip would just slide right forward.
Plus, the texture felt more like plastic than rubber,
and when you splashed water on it, it beaded up perfectly—a mysterious material,
and it was dangerously slippery on manhole covers and braille blocks.
Very sketchy stuff indeed.
so maybe there's also fake tires made from tapioca on the flip side.