Knowing when to replace your mountain bike tires is a very important part of caring for your mountain bike, since not only is riding around on tires that are too worn something that can be dangerous, but it is also something that can be bad for the rims of your bike as well.
The most common sign that you need to replace the old tires on your mountain bike is when the rubber starts to show how old it is by becoming hard and by getting cracks in it. This is a clear sign that the rubber is getting too old to use.
There are other signs that you can look for to know that it is time to replace your tires as well. Age is one of the things, but even fairly new tires can need to be replaced if you have been doing a lot of riding or for other reasons.
What Causes The Rubber Of A Tire To Harden?
There are a few things that can make the rubber of the tires on your bike harden faster, and along those same lines there are a few things that you can do in order to help keep them soft and pliable so that you can continue to use them for a longer amount of time.
When the rubber is hard then it has the tendency to crack instead of bending and this is because the hard rubber actually has a certain amount of brittleness to it. This makes it dangerous to ride a mountain bike that has old and hard tires, since the bumps of the trail will make the tire crack and can make it crack so deeply that you end up with a blowout.
The main two things that can cause a tire to harden faster is excessive heat and sunlight. It is for this reason that you should not store your bike in a hot attic, since this is a great place to put your bike at only if you want the rubber of the tires to age faster and to get hard on you before you get back to it again.
The best place to put your bike is in the house where it is both out of the sun and cool, however few people have the space in their house for this. The next best place is in a shed or garage so that it is out of the sun and not too hot if at all possible.
Part of what causes the rubber to harden is that it dries out, so putting a fan blowing directly onto the tires for long periods of time is also not something that is a very good idea to do. However, that being the case, if you can successfully remoisturize the rubber when it starts to get hard then you can potentially save it.
In order to do this you can use a variety of things, but you will have much more success if you do this when the rubber first starts to harden and before there is any cracking or any other damage to the tire yet. Most of the things that you can use are oily, since water – and definitely things like rubbing alcohol – will not do anything but dry out the rubber more.
One of the options that you have is to use olive oil or coconut oil, while some bikers prefer to use other things like brake fluid, and there is even newer things that you can use that are specifically for keeping the rubber on tires soft that are getting easier to find now.
Whatever you decide to use to help re-moisturize the rubber of your tires, you should be careful not to over-apply it to the rubber since the rubber can soak up too much. In other words, you do not want to just put your whole tire in a bowl of it and let it sit there and expect it to work right.
One way to do this if you are using the olive or coconut oil is to put enough oil on your hands so that your hands are not dripping with it but have a noticeable sheen to them and then to rub the hard rubber with your oiled hands. Work the oil into the rubber as you do so, starting gently at first, then leave it and check it after a while to see what the effect was and repeat as needed in small doses.
If there is cracking to the tire, and especially if the cracks are deep, then it has gone too far and you should replace the tire without even wasting your time in trying to make the rubber softer since the cracks can compromise the tire and therefore your safety.
Other Signs That You Should Replace Your Tires
There are a few other reasons why you should replace the tires on your mountain bike besides just simply due to the fact that the leather has aged. One of the more common of these is that the rubber of the tread can wear out if you do a lot of mountain biking.
Some mountain bikes even have a wear indicator on them which will let you know that you should replace the tires on your bike before you do much more riding. This indicator most often comes in the form of a very specific groove that wears down as the rubber. As the rubber is used up it will get to the point where you no longer see any signs of it having been there, and you can know that you should replace that tire.
This indicator is there to let you know that the rubber on the tire is getting thin, and once it gets too thin it is much easier to puncture and more likely to burst. If you keep riding it even after this point it is possible to wear the rubber all the way down to where you can see the threads. This is very dangerous since these threads are easy to puncture and are not made to handle the wear and tear of the trail.
Another sign that you should replace your tires is that there are too many holes in them. Holes can be caused by thorns, sharp rocks, wood splinters, and they can be caused really easily by other things as well such as broken glass.
While some holes in a bike tire can be either plugged or patched up depending on where they are at and on how big they are, some holes cannot be fixed. A tire that is patched and is leaking air no matter what you do to try to fix it is a definite sign that you should replace the tire on your bike, as is a hole that cannot be fixed for obvious reasons.
Another fairly obvious sign that you should replace one of the tires on your bike is if it gets a deformity in it somewhere or if you see a bubble in the side of the tire. Sometimes the first thing you will notice is a bump every time your wheel goes around.
These deformities can be caused by manufacturing errors and in this case they usually do not wait too long before showing themselves. They can be caused sometimes by putting too much air in your tires or by having a large amount of air and then hitting something very hard, but at other times there is seemingly no apparent reason for them.
However, since there is no patch that works for fixing a bubble or a deformity then there is nothing you can really do for it besides replacing the tire. If this was due to a manufacturer’s error then sometimes you can get a refund or a replacement.
When you do replace your tires with new ones, make sure that you recycle or reuse your old tires. There are any number of crafts that you can do with them, or you can take them to a bike shop to be recycled into stuff for playgrounds.