Okay. I weigh in at 280 right now and the other day this older dude was admiring Cronus as I stopped at the Ace Hardware and thought I needed air in my rear tire because it looked flat when I was riding.
I had pumped it up to 32 psi and ride it this way for miles and miles.
The thing is though is that I rather would like to see my tire not look so flat even though on my end it's rather okay.
So do Bicycle tires really designed for people less than 200 pounds here or should I chance a blowout by putting in some more air?...
There's a number of factors here:
-280 lbs is not too heavy for normal bike tires. I weigh ~270 and the MB I have weighs ~100 lbs itself, and about two-thirds of the total weight is on the rear wheel. The usual inflation pressures are 40 PSI rear and 22 PSI front. The cheap white Kenda tires at 40 PSI have held up fine. The rear tire does bulge out a bit when I'm on the bike, but tires are supposed to sag under a load.
-Cheap tires are not made to as tight of tolerances, and will tend to pop off of rims if the tire pressure is too high.
-Cheap rims are not made as strong, and will spread more, allowing tires to pop off easier.
-Wide rims will provide a much wider area to distribute load over. Most non-cruiser bicycles now come with rims around an inch wide, and that's too narrow for MB use. Cruiser bicycles come with wider rims, but they are usually single-wall, which is the weakest type, so
you can't inflate tires very high on them without risking pop-offs. But the thing here is that because of the wider contact patch that the wider rims provide, they don't need to be inflated to high pressures. 40 PSI should be plenty for the tire to easily hold 300+ lbs.
Basically put--generally for any bicycle, but
especially for motorized bicycles--you want the
widest rims you can get. The Worksman regular (steel) rims are fairly wide, they are over 1-1/2" wide but the edges are rolled so the inside width is not as great as it would be with extruded aluminum rims. There's a number of "downhill" MTB rims that approach one and a half inch widths; if you have a rear wheel specially-built anyway, get a decent rim on the rear. Ask the bicycle shop what kinds of "downhill-MTB" rims they can get and start asking about the widest ones they can get, and work on down until there's one you can afford.
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MTB bicycles today are very-commonly fitted with rims that are far too narrow. The bicycle companies did this to reduce weight, but it drove tire pressures way upwards, and is of no benefit at all (this is stated even on the Sheldon Brown website). Ideally, your rims should be almost as wide as the tires your running.
In the 1970's, road-racing bikes had tires about 1.25 inches wide and rims around an inch wide,,, and MTBs had tires about 2.25 inches wide and rims about 1.75 inches wide. Nowadays, both road bikes and MTBs come with rims around an inch wide, even though the tire widths are the same.
One of these things is WRONG.
If you look at other vehicles.... cars, motorcycles, ATVs,
anything else,
nobody, nobody, nobody EVER tries to mount a 12-inch wide tire on the same-width rim as a six-inch wide tire. It is assumed by anyone with a brain that if the tire is wider, that the rim needs to be wider also. And yet, people think for bicycles that's correct, because that's the way the bicycles come when you go look at them at the bike store.
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