Ok, just got home from work. Installed Dunlop 555 140/80/15 on the rear at 10,000 miles. I now have 11,394 miles and have 9/32 tread depth.

I bought the tire online for 110 bucks shipped and paid a shop here 50 bucks to remove the wheel, mount and balance the tire. Now I'm needing the ft tire and have a fork seal leaking. I suppose I'll try the fork seal myself and while I'm at it, I'll remove the ft wheel and take it to get a tire put on it.

This one is sorta too heavy at the gate too, $160 at the gate with only 9/32 thread available (.022").   You could have bought 3 of my tires for that price, and I have .310" worth of thread on each of mine.

 
Thanks WD, but I'm good for the next 5 or so years with the Nexen I just bought for $55.64 from my local WalMart.   Since I modded the rear fender for the 165/80 Nankang that I ran before so I likely have enough room for this one as well.

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 07/16/12 at 12:52:34:

I just mounted a brandy new rear Metzeler ME880 and took it out for a nice twisty 70-80 mile break-in rip on Saturday.  I'll have to get the paperwork and a tread depth gauge.  

We have a contender here, freshly mounted Metzler 880 !!!

 
Got my new tire mounted this morning.  Even with cutting away the unnecessary tubeless sealing rubber until the bead looked about like a normal old style tube type bead the air pressure necessary to seat the bead was still 56 psi and that is still up in the danger zone for bead breakage.    

Note: these were Mexican built 155/80r15 BF Goodrich Radial TAs that did all this bead breaking we keep talking about, but the lessons learned from them are still applied to mounting any and all car type tires on the rear end of a bike.  
Don't go over 60 psi to pop the bead -- something is wrong if you have to go there -- stop and fix it.

Oh well, we are gonna have to stick with not recommending car tires to anybody as folks who put them on the rims really need to know what they are doing.   We have had too many broken beads due to people hanging up a bead on something then hitting it with too high an air pressure trying to get it to go ahead and seat anyway.  

Bloooowie !!!!  Ears ringing and left wrist bleeding, months to recover completely -- don't EVER go over 60 psi to seat a bead.

BTW, MMRanch turned me on to putting grease on that small patch of bead that just won't seat otherwise.   I don't know where he picked that trick up from, but it works.    You don't grease the entire bead, just the stubborn section that won't seat otherwise.   This way rotation or slippage won't ever be an issue since less than 20% of the circumference gets the grease applied to it and the other 80% sticks to the metal rim just fine when the water and soap dry up.

Now for balancing and installation on the bike, then we will be good to go to start the Great Tire Mileage Race.

Here are my Metzler 880s at 15,000 miles. Oh yea, and I weigh 300+ pounds.

Rear


oooooh, them Metzlers look like they are some stiff competition headed my way on the mileage front


Front

 
Here is the Nexen is sitting on my high tech balance stand.   This tire required 17 inches of small diameter solder wire to balance it -- no big horkin' lead weights on the spokes (even the smallest one that I had was too too much).  

This is the best balanced tire I have ever put on a bike, ever.


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Race mathematical methodology:

Obviously you would be best served to have a freshly mounted tire to get maximum mileage and get a least calculated cost per thousandth worn off the tire.

But, the methodology would allow a "tire in progress" to compete in the short term as the amount worn off per year is just a small sliver of the total tire life.

I propose to take the total cost of the shipped and mounted tire divided by the height of the tread in thousandths to come up with a "total cost per thousandth".   Then, each year when you report your tread height we can instantly calculate what your cost per mile was for that year and meatball how many miles "theoretically" you have left to go on the tire.

This method doesn't care how many miles you put on the tire in a year.  A little or a lot, it doesn't matter to the math.

Now, this method does penalize the Shinko guys appropriately for having to change their tires 2-3x more often for the same miles than the Metzer guys who only had to do it once.  The life of the tire consumes the entire shipping and mounting cost after all.   However, remember the Shinko costs a whale of a lot less than a Metzler so they might be competitive in the short haul cost per mile.

Thoughts anyone?   Can this be improved in any fashion?

For example, my Nexen cost $52 ($55.64 with tax) picked up at my local WalMart.  I mounted it myself, so my shipping & mounting cost was nil.  I have 310 thousandths of tread depth in the center next to the valve stem.  My total cost per thousandth of thread depth (stated in dollars) is $55.64 / 310 = $0.179
(or roughly 18 cents per thousandth).  

How long this is going to last is a different story of course, but I do have a lot of thousandths to burn on this particular tire and the net cost was low, so I think I might have me a contender.

So, unless you have a different method to propose, what is your shipped and mounted cost and your tread depth for each brand of contender out there?  We will need your current odometer mileage too.


Hey, check out the nicely curved radius on this tire, I got some high hopes for this one, I do

ralfyguy wrote on 07/20/12 at 11:05:58:


+1
I like to push real hard into the twisties so this would be a real concern for me.