Quote from: LA on November 05, 2008, 04:37:50 PM
Is this a trick question? 

My bike EATS tires.  I go through 5 rears and at least 2 fronts per year.  If I'm careful I get barely over 2000 mi. on a rear tire. From my experience, if Ducati had designed the S4R/RS to destroy tires, they couldn't have done any better.

Thank goodness , my local bike shop gives me very good deals and mounts on the rim for $20.00, because I use so many tires per year.

LA

+1 That tire wear is not normal. I go through at least a set each year. 5 years? You must be pulling our leg.

maybe I have magic tires.  But since they are all out of em any recommendations?

Quote from: daftduc on November 06, 2008, 06:39:06 PM
maybe I have magic tires.  But since they are all out of em any recommendations?

go for the Michelin pilot roads. they are a sport touring tire and wear awesomely. I got them due to the commuting wear I put on tires. they last alot longer than pure sport tires, but will still grip hard when you lean them over when you are out riding the piss out of your bike.

I have a friend that has done a lot of track time on Pilot Roads and says they grip very well and last long too.

LA

Quote from: Le Pirate on November 06, 2008, 06:56:43 PM
go for the Michelin pilot roads. they are a sport touring tire and wear awesomely. I got them due to the commuting wear I put on tires. they last alot longer than pure sport tires, but will still grip hard when you lean them over when you are out riding the piss out of your bike.

They now make Pilot Road 2CTs. Kinda on the expensive side though. I  just picked up my first pilot road 2ct rear.

Quote from: Clickjack on November 04, 2008, 10:47:10 AM
But I seem to remember reading in the manual that the tire's expected life span was like 5 years.  I could be wrong.  But still 5 years hard use (Frequent Riding or Wheelies) on a tire sounds good to me.

so what should we expect then?

Quote from: MendoDave on November 05, 2008, 04:46:19 PM
+1 That tire wear is not normal. I go through at least a set each year.

Around here it is fairly normal wear for people who ride fairly agressively. LA and I ride the same roads, and probably somewhere around the same pace. My wife and I went through 18 tires last year and 14 tires the year before. Here are two examples of tires from my wife's GSXR.



This tire has a little over 300 miles on it...




I think this one only had about 2200 miles or so on it....




She's going to finish off another set today, so we can change them out for the weekend, this evening. The ones on her R1 had 1600 miles on the front and rear and were to the wear bars. Yesterday, she had bald rings around the left and right of center on the front and almost bald on the rear. She'll probably hit cords by noon, today.

How do you guys do that and in what temperature? Looks like heavy track use, perhaps a moto gp race was won with one of those? I have been riding in low autumn temperature 2000 miles and my rear tire still looks new

Quote from: semyhr on November 07, 2008, 05:42:59 AM
How do you guys do that and in what temperature? Looks like heavy track use, perhaps a moto gp race was won with one of those? I have been riding in low autumn temperature 2000 miles and my rear tire still looks new

The first tire was around 70 degrees and a single run up Hwy 215 to the Blue Ridge Parkway (about 15 miles) from Rosman, NC. The road is quite coarse and will chew tires up really easily....especially soft tires. That tire is a Dunlop D208, which is soft and doesn't get crap for mileage. It had 36 psi in it, too.

We have three really coarse roads around here that will chew tires up....Hwy 276 (Caesar's Head) in South Carolina, Hwy 215 in North Carolina, and Hwy 348 in northern Georgia. I think the second tire may have been a Pirelli Diablo, IIRC.

Quote from: Desmo Demon on November 07, 2008, 05:26:24 AM
Around here it is fairly normal wear for people who ride fairly agressively. LA and I ride the same roads, and probably somewhere around the same pace. My wife and I went through 18 tires last year and 14 tires the year before. Here are two examples of tires from my wife's GSXR.



This tire has a little over 300 miles on it...




I think this one only had about 2200 miles or so on it....




She's going to finish off another set today, so we can change them out for the weekend, this evening. The ones on her R1 had 1600 miles on the front and rear and were to the wear bars. Yesterday, she had bald rings around the left and right of center on the front and almost bald on the rear. She'll probably hit cords by noon, today.

Damn Terry,  The wife gets with the program.  And I'd say you got your money's worth and then some outa that last tire.

La

Quote from: LA on November 07, 2008, 06:58:25 AM
Damn Terry,  The wife gets with the program.  And I'd say you got your money's worth and then some outa that last tire.

It's weird, though. My wife and I can run the same tires, ride the same roads, go at the same pace, and at the same time, but she butchers her tires a lot more than I do. She rides the GSXR and R1 the hardest, which have 30+ more HP than any of my bikes, but I don't think our riding styles differ enough to have a large noticeable difference in our tire wear. She does sit upright and I will slide off the seat, but it sometimes makes me jealous that her tires shred more than mine.   

As for wearing them down to the cords, she's just crazier than I am. I only hit cords if I go on a long ride and leave the house on marginal tires. She purposely leaves the house with intentions of seeing cords by the time she gets home.....it's her little personal goal with her tires....she's even hit cords with the FRONT tire.      The woman's nuts, I tell ya! 

Quote from: Speedbag on November 04, 2008, 03:17:08 PM
FWIW, I'm lucky to get 3500 miles per rear tire. Typically a front will last through two rears. YMMV.

That tire is shot. To hell. Replace and enjoy. 

+1, with the way that rubber gets harder and more brittle over time, a tire from 03 should have been replaced by 05 at the latest - especially if it's hardly been ridden. It's important to know how the read the "born on" date that's printed on a tire when you do buy a new one so that you get the most out of it. Just because it's new at a retailer doesn't mean that it hasn't been sitting in a warehouse for a year already. Most of the time that's what happens when you see a place blowing out tires at ultra low prices.

As for mileage, if you were to keep a bike long enough to run through a set or two of tires and are concerned about mileage, I run with the Pilot Road tires, even did a track day on them and am hearing 14,000 miles on them - no exageration - and I can corner with the best of them:



I have been really impressed with the wear of these tires and how many miles that I've gotten out of them. I'd be hard pressed to change, but for a more agressive tire, look at the Pilot Road 2CT's.

Quote from: Monster Dave on November 07, 2008, 08:42:29 AM
As for mileage, if you were to keep a bike long enough to run through a set or two of tires and are concerned about mileage, I run with the Pilot Road tires, even did a track day on them and am hearing 14,000 miles on them - no exageration

We currently have some 2CTs on the Monster and a set of Roads on the wife's ST2. Neither bike gets ridden too hard, so I'm interested in seeing what kind of mileage we will get out of them. Most of our friends who switched from the Pirelli products now swear by the Michelins and say they get 50% more mileage from the Michelins than the Pirellis, but......there is no way on this green Earth that any of them will ever come close to 14,000 miles. They'd be lucky to see 3500-4000 while riding on a lot of cold and wet pavement. The roads by you must be fairly smooth. The only tires I have ever seen that have gotten more than 10,000 miles have been the hard Dunlop D401 and D402 tires that I run on my Harley.

Quote from: Desmo Demon on November 07, 2008, 09:05:02 AM
We currently have some 2CTs on the Monster and a set of Roads on the wife's ST2. Neither bike gets ridden too hard, so I'm interested in seeing what kind of mileage we will get out of them. Most of our friends who switched from the Pirelli products now swear by the Michelins and say they get 50% more mileage from the Michelins than the Pirellis, but......there is no way on this green Earth that any of them will ever come close to 14,000 miles. They'd be lucky to see 3500-4000 while riding on a lot of cold and wet pavement. The roads by you must be fairly smooth. The only tires I have ever seen that have gotten more than 10,000 miles have been the hard Dunlop D401 and D402 tires that I run on my Harley.

I'm in Arizona, so the temps are usually hot and the roads are not subject to salt and snow. But I ride between Phoenix and Tucson a lot, use my bike daily as my primary vehicle, and do lots of fun runs and twisties on the weekends when time permits, and I swear when I removed my last set of tires I had just 6k miles on my bike, now I have just over 20k and I bought them less than a year ago. I know that it sounds crazy, but even with a track day under my belt on them, I'd estimate given the wear on them, that I've probably got another 3-4 thousand miles left in them.