Well…it shoots fire from it’s handlebars, and it glides along on the ground using a form of black magic. It can also transform into a robot and likes to battle the forces of evil. Otherwise it’s just a standard bike.
change that front, quick smart!
used to run battelax on my courier bike for a while: they were grippy and cheap, but got sick and tired of front end loses in the wet (as you would), so switched back to Metzler Comp Ks. best courier wet and dry tire by far… but not available for scooters.
the block pattern on many scooter tires is too large, and you can have a patch with no grooves in contact with the road, so you aquaplane (a hydroplane is the attitude control plane on a submarine). this was the problem with battleax tires, for me.
i have always been happy with Michelins, on pretty much every bike i have owned, but they are expensive for some. get the grippiest tires you can and keep them well inflated. most scooter trips are too short to get the tire hot enough anyway, so you need a tire that will grip when cold as well as when hot.
Maoman: and others: that tread deformation is partly due to tire design and material, partly due to heavy braking, but most likely due to chronic underinflation. get more air in there!
I have Battlax BT021 tires on my 955i Sprint but I’m not particularly impressed with them. Handling is nice but it’s too easy to push the rear into a powerslide. Years ago I had a set of Battlaxs on my NSR and thought they were great. I think Bridgestone are falling behind in the technology race. Next set I will go with Michelins. I would have bought them this time but for the recall they had on the 2CT Pilot Powers.
No, it was just a defective tire. I was always pretty anal about correct tire pressure on my motorcycles. Yamaha admitted fault and replaced both tires.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroplaning_(road_vehicle (Can’t get link to post correctly so it needs to be copied and pasted)
msgroup.org/TIP035.html
roadtripamerica.com/Defensiv … Rule29.htm
For god’s sake, do what everyone else does and use a bloody pump! No matter how much cabbage you eat, you’re never going to get your tyres hard enough that way. Plus, nobody wants to see you doing that.
ooh, that’s an interesting image. thanks, sandman.
terminology: i stand corrected! i think there may also be a British/American split there.
It was a few years ago that i last rode on Battlaxes. Bridgestone tires may not be what they used to be. i don’t know, i have mostly used pirelli or michelins recently on big bikes, and Maxxis on scooters.
Excuses, excuses. 
[quote=“urodacus”]
It was a few years ago that i last rode on Battlaxes.[/quote]
Yeah, it was for me too. My last set were awesome, the current set, less so. Oh well. They will wear out soon enough!
For god’s sake, do what everyone else does and use a bloody pump! No matter how much cabbage you eat, you’re never going to get your tyres hard enough that way. Plus, nobody wants to see you doing that.[/quote]
That is hilarious! Cabbage is in abundance in Taiwanese cuisine, though… as a cheap filler…
This is a quote worth reading from Wikipedia (and it’s always what I suspected):
“Vehicles with round-profile tires, such as bicycles and motorcycles, virtually never suffer from hydroplaning in normal road use. The contact area with the road is a canoe-shaped patch that effectively squeezes water out of the way. However, because road friction is so much less in wet conditions, the lateral force that the tires can accommodate before sliding is greatly diminished. While a slide in a four-wheeled vehicle is correctable with practice, the same slide on a motorcycle will generally cause the rider to fall, with severe consequences. Despite the relative lack of hydroplaning danger then, motorcycle riders do well to be even more cautious than car drivers in poor conditions.”
The main problem then, is maybe not so much the tires, but stuff like painted lines and personhole (politically correct version of manhole… haha) covers. If someone could invent non-slippery road paint, that’d be a boon for both the inventor and the streets of Taiwan and Italy.
I also don’t like those glass reflector bubble things on the road. Cat-eyes I think they’re called.
Going along with this conversation, I’m sometimes scared that as one is riding his or her scooter over those silver-coloured metal storm grates in the ground that they might just give way one day and cause a scooter/bike tire to dive into it. (They’re usually only found on the curb of the road, but sometimes are found in the middle of the road, too).
[quote=“shawn_c”]If someone could invent non-slippery road paint, that’d be a boon for both the inventor and the streets of Taiwan and Italy.[/quote]Someone did. And most countries use it. I seem to remember reading recently that people were campaigning for its introduction here.
Ohh… they should introduce it here right away!