Quote:
Originally Posted by benb
I agree with tuscanyswe, they have specific use cases where they work and the rest of the time in the winter you shouldn't need them.
Do you MTB? I only ask cause MTB skills make more difference than the tires. Riding in snow & ice requires ultra smooth bike handling. Studded tires mostly make a little difference (a few % points?) in what you can ride if you have good skills.
I've got Nokian Extremes for my MTB. An excellent bike handler can ride across a frozen pond/lake on them. An average bike handler will crash very quickly no different than unstudded tires.
I have a set of 35NRTH 700x35c studded tires for my All City Space Horse.. they have fewer studs and it's nowhere near as good as the MTB. More security than anything else.
Neither set of tires will help at all if you fail to notice a patch of ice and you ride through it at speed while cornering or you are going straight and you mash the pedals or brake hard on the ice. You can't do the roadie zone out thing in winter riding, you need to be watching the road the way you watch a technical MTB trail. And both sets make the bike feel like a tank. We are talking serious serious extra weight and slow acceleration. I haven't even put them on in a few years it's such a buzzkill to ride with them.
On the flipside if you get a set they last a long time.
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I MTB more than anything else, am comfortable with black diamond trails, and I think it's my comfort with loose traction situations that kept me off the deck this AM.
Your post is kinda confirming what I was thinking, which is that there will always be some risk and studs are only mitigating a small % of that, especially for a place like Denver that does get snow fairly often, but also has it melt fairly quickly and doesn't spend weeks on end at sub-freezing temperatures.