Lifan xpect 60/40 tires. What do you recommend?
 

My tires are starting to wear down a bit. They don’t have enough knob on them at the moment. When I ride in deep sand or mud, they don’t do very well.

Considering that there is a shortage of tires, and it’s going to take a long time to get them, I’m thinking I should start figuring out which ones and order them soon.

I’d like tires that do very well on the road, but have enough knobs to go into mud and sand. I’m sure that’s like having your cake and eating it too. I know you can’t have both. So I figure 60% dirt, 40% tar?

I’d at least like them to perform on the pavement as well as the stock tires do. They seem to do a pretty good job. But, they are a little bit less than great in deep sand and deep mud.

Also, one of the main things I’m trying to solve with these tires would be to get a little bit of stability in the front end. The deep mud and the sand with these stock tires tends to give easy washouts on the front wheel. Very easy to put it down.

Maybe I need 50/50. Idk. Whole new world for me.

Put knobby tires on, big improvement.

I'd read that the Bridgestone AX41's come in the correct sizes and work well offroad

What does that mean for on road?

My experience is very limited in enduro stuff.

I come from riding a CBR 900 RR on the road. And three wheelers off-road. So I have no relevant experience to cross the two. Do the Knobbies work OK for going full speed around corners on the road?

These have some similarity to the big block tires I was looking at. They have those big blocks that look like they would stick well to pavement.


But they are spaced far apart. Any issues with them skipping out in turns on the tar?

They look good for dirt though. Mud looks it it would fall right off with that spacing and they almost look like paddle wheels for sand.

There not great at full speed going straight.:tdown:

Here is the unfortunate truth. No 50/50 60/40 or 40/60 tire will perform great off road, especially in mud and sand. Some do OK, but the compromise for street use still leaves them well behind a 10/90 tire (90% off road) aka DOT approved knobby.

Tires like this are often a lot like the racing world analogy that I love. Cheap, Fast, Reliable. Pick two.

I personally pick the tire that performs the best in the worst case scenario. IE, if I am going to be dealing with sand or heavy mud on a more regular basis, I will sacrifice some of the street manners to have that added traction. It's much easier to adjust your riding to the tires on pavement since you can't really adjust the terrain to suit your tires... short of not going into said terrain in the first place.

Damn. So it’s one of those situations. Pick two. I know that really well from boats.

Ok, I had better accept reality and try for something just a tiny bit better off road than my current tires. I feel the on road is more important because opposite of Megadan, I adjust my off road to meet the tires I have now, but at road speeds, prefer to have the safe feeling of good performing tires.

My current tires work fine for 90% to 95% of the terrain I’ve encountered riding all around the country. It’s just 4-12” deep sand that I have had problems in. Stuff like you’d find at the beach or in a sand pit. And it’s mostly just the front plowing and trying to tip the bike over.

I’ve been able to just ride right through mud of similar depth without too much hassle.

I chose the mud. I could have avoided it. The sand is everywhere here in Florida. There is no avoiding it when you are riding off road. It will find you. Thankfully, I’m not riding here off road forever.

I was really hoping to improve the sand handling, but didn’t want to do it at the expense of road handling.

My current stock tires seem to be a copy of Perelli MT60 tires

Any ideas about tires that might give the same road performance while being a little better at tracking straight in the deep sand? I’ve never felt that I was going to get stuck. Just have trouble with the front wheel tracking and not washing out.

Would the Bridgestone AX41s do something like that? Or are those “big block” tires going to be bad on the street?

The 19” front wheel is a part of your problem off road .

How, exactly?

That makes it do worse In the deep sand somehow?

Should I buy a new 21” front wheel? If I did, would that make the bike unstable at speed on the road?

Would that cause tank slappers?

The 21” wheel will get up and float over the bumps and be stable while the 19” wheel will find every rut and fall into every hole .

Knobbies aren't as bad on the pavement as you might think. They do wear out quicker, you can't lean as hard through the curves or take turns quite as quickly, but it doesn't take long to get used to them. I used to live in the NC mountains and used to use non-DOT off road knobbies on my street plated trail bikes. The DOT knobbies didn't perform as well off road and were much harder to mount, because the sidewalls are a lot stiffer. The local inspectors never paid any attention to the tire ratings, which was fortunate for me.

Regardless of the tires you're running, be sure to reduce the air pressure when trail riding. You can run as low as about 8 psi if your wheels have rim-locks. If you don't have rim-locks I'd guess 12 psi would be a safe limit. (Of course, it also depends on how stiff the sidewalls are, etc.)
The reason you want to reduce the air pressure is that it softens the impact of bumps on the front wheel & and increases traction on the rear. If you street pressure the front wheel will bounce off objects & make steering much more difficult.

Racers use specially designed inner tubes that allow them to run super low pressures, like 2-3 psi. That gives you an idea of how important running low pressure is off road.

If you've never tried knobbies I'd recommend trying them. If you realize that you don't really need them you can easily swap back to dual sport tires later. Dual sport tires work okay as long as the trails are dry, but once there's any mud they clog up and are pretty worthless. If your trails are sandy or rocky that wouldn't be an issue.

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Maybe… :shrug: