and there arose an exultant sound

Winter!

We are getting a real one this year.

I have tried to make it through the winter on my bicycle as I have in the past. Due to the nature of my job, with its variable and far flung work locations, bicycle commuting is a challenge at best, and impossible at worst. Be that as it may, when the fates conspire to give me a location for the day close to home, I take my bike.

Which brings us to winter!

Winter!

We are getting a real one this year.

Thus far, we have had a lot of snow, a lot of ice, and a lot of thawing (with the extra special glare ice which comes with rain and a thaw on packed snow). And so naturally it was this year, as opposed to two years ago when winter gave Southern Ontario a miss, I tried to use as my primary winter tire on the bicycle a non-studded tire set.

This was not a mistake as they perform well, but it does make for some unnecessarily interesting rides to work. Slippy kinds of rides. The combination of huge snowbanks, packed down MUPS, and narrower lanes and ice have made me come to the conclusion that perhaps those Schwalbe Ice Spikers I have sitting there on the basement floor would serve me better if they were on the rims of my bicycle.

Now I used these tires all last winter, and loved them, but since then I have swapped out my frankenfenders for a stock set of unmodified planet bike mountain bike fenders with honking big mud flaps. I was somewhat concerned that the rear Ice Spiker would not fit and would pick away at the fenders.

However, after fighting with the Continentals that were on the bike (why are they so hard to remove?!?), cleaning up the wheels and bike and slathering the frame and all but the brakes with rust proofing solution, and putting on the Ice Spikers, and reinstalling the wheels on the bike...

... there arose an exultant sound.

They fit. With huge clearance. And no need to screw around with the fender adjustments.

Continental Top Contact Winter II

 Tire Test: Continental Top Contact Winter II

Time for another tire review. As before, I am not a professional reviewer, I just ride bikes and use stuff. I pay for what I use myself with my own money, blah blah etc etc etc.

The tire this time around is a lovely little winter tire called the Continental Top Contact Winter II. Readers of this mighty blog of mine know that I am a big fan of the right tire for the job, but in case you are new here, here is a bit of history for you.

When I started riding a bicycle as a car, and decided to ride all year round, I got through my first winter with a set of burned out mud type cyclo-cross tires on my bike. I was using a Kona Dew with 700c wheels. The tires were great actually, and did a good job. I forget what they were though - something from Nokian I think (heck, I doubt I even have the name right even in my guess!).

The following winter, I used a set of Schwalbe CX Pro tires in the winter. They sucked. Complete crap. While very good in mud and on gravel (what they were made for to be fair), on snow and ice, they sucked. No other word for it. Two bad falls in six hours put me off of them in the winter for life.

I swapped them out for Schwalbe Marathon Winter tires, with studs. Loved those, even if they did have a tendency to toss studs out at the drop of a hat.

A bicycle swap saw me go from 700c to 26in tires. Enter a need for new winter tires. This time around, I did not mess about and went with Schwalbe Ice Spiker HS 333 tires. They were fantastic. Huge amount of grip in the snow. Very good on ice. But, they had some serious drawbacks. The rubber wore a lot since I ride on asphalt a lot. Also, the things are very heavy, and buzz like mad. But if you ride over hard packed snow all winter, they are well worth it.

This put me in search of a good winter tire which did not have studs, but would still give vastly improved grip in the snow.

Enter the Continental Top Contact Winter II.

Here is the company link for the tire for those who care about such things: http://www.conti-online.com/www/bicycle_de_en/themes/city/winter/topContactWinter_en.html

I went with the 26x1.9 tire size.

The first thing I noted was that the tire rolled much better than a studded tire. Gee, ya think? It was almost as fast as a slick, but not quite. Due to the soft rubber compound - supple until -25C - the tire has a lot of drag compared to summer spec tires with similar tread patterns. Pump it up to its maximum tire pressure, and it rolls along quite nicely. Other than feeling a bit squishy, it is hard to tell the tire is not "ordinary".

Like all winter tires, best grip is had in snow when the tire pressure is lowered and the tire is allowed to squash out a bit. Remember - get narrow tires for winter as they sink into the snow and bite the surface underneath. This is good unless you are "fat biking".

The winter specific rubber compound tires, like this one, are great in cold weather as they offer better grip on bare asphalt than a summer tire will, even if the tread patterns are identical. That right there makes these tires worth buying. The rubber does not freeze into hard blocks with little flex and reduced traction.

The tire pattern is quite bizarre for one used to aggressive tread in slippery conditions like I am. It is very shallow, and is basically a pattern of sipes designed to "grip" to ice and snow. Think Bridgestone Blizzak for example, or Spiderman's fingerprints. Whatever the case, it works.

The tire actually will retain some semblance of control even when black ice is hit. Don't think it is a studded tire though - the ice spikers currently sitting in the basement out perform the Continentals on the bike right now on ice by such a large margin that they are not even close to being in the same league. You MUST take more care on ice if you are coming from studs to this tire. Otherwise, they, and the ground, will bite you on the ass.

That said, the difference from a summer tire is remarkable. I was able to do limited steering and braking on black ice and did not feel as if the bike was about to slide out from under me.  Sudden moves are a bad idea though. And the bike will "float" a bit without a doubt, but if you keep your eyes up, relax, and let the bike float, it is not much worse than floating a mountain bike over liquid clay. Doable, but take care.

What about snow?

It is actually not too bad. The above picture shows what the tire looks like when rolling through a bit of snow. It packs up a bunch, but grips really really well. The tread pattern just plain works. I could brake hard, steer (some slip, but not bad) and accelerate just fine in the snow today. Today, we had a layer of black ice with about one to two cm of snow on top. Not much, to be sure, but potentially very slippery due to the ice underneath it. The tires were just fine. I was quite impressed when I pulled away from a stop on a steepish hill with snow and ice on it and the bike just went about climbing it. There was no slip at all from the back end and steering on this surface was fine. I was running tire pressures a bit below optimal for dry roads, which definitely helped.

Once I got more comfortable with the grip levels, I deliberately tried to upset them. Jerking the handlebar side to side at low speeds in the snow did not result in much if any real slip. Works for me. I know that they will skid, but the skid appears likely to be very controllable. Should be good.

One thing to note is how much water they hold in the sipes. You will leave a long track behind you after running through a puddle. It is this heavy duty siping coupled with the soft rubber that gives it its grip. While they hold a lot of water, they don't kick up as much snow as the knobby tires do. The mud flaps on the fenders did accumulate some build up, but not a lot. Very little to nothing got on my feet either. This is due in part to my fenders - I use Planet Bike Cascadia ATB fenders from MEC which really help keep the slop off of me. But the tendency of the tires to not throw a lot of snow helped as well.

I reserve judgement on their flat resistance since I only have about 100km on my set right now. They claim some protection from flats, but I don't expect protection on the level of a Schwalbe Marathon commuter tire. We shall see :)

This serves as a preliminary run down of the tire. So far, other than being a bit sketchy on ice, they are wonderful. A good friend of mine, who runs two bikes in the winter - one with studs, and one with these tires - reported that he only needed his studded tire bike five times last winter. His bike with these tires did it for him for the rest of the season.

Good deal if you ask me.

Update 1:

More snow riding has been done so I figured that an update was in order.

My earlier initial observations about the tires being good in the snow turned out to be correct. In general, I just ignore the tires and let them do their thing. Tires that just vanish and do their part are a pure win. They slip a bit, but do not dramatically skid out or cause concern. They remind me of the old Continental Cross Country tires that I had on my mountain bike over a decade ago. Those tires would grip like mad while slipping at the same time. It was a strange feeling - basically, they would skid out but in a very controlled manner which made "floating" the bike easy. They could be pushed very hard since the point of adhesion loss was so progressive. These snow tires do a similar thing.

Deepen the snow a bit though and they start to fall apart. They do not like deep snow very much and the bicycle will get a bit squirmy. It does not make the bicycle significantly unstable, but it is important to note. Rough unplowed paths are also a bit of a problem with these tires since they lack the tread to really bite into such surfaces. The machine will bounce around a bit. It won't dump a rider that is used to off road riding, but the tires are not as good as my studded Schwalbes are in similar circumstances.

When riding through slush and water on the road, the bicycle handled flawlessly. An incredible amount of water gets tossed up by the tires in such circumstances. It is very important that proper full fenders be used or the rider WILL get soaked.

Try to avoid hitting rock hard "pancakes" of ice on the road. The kinds of ice that are mixed in with slush and almost invisible. The bike will bounce off of them and get a bit skittish. Studded tires are better for that. So, avoid deep slush after an ice storm unless you are sure that the slush is all slush. Of course, these conditions are fairly rare.

My over all conclusion from initial observations remains the same. The tires are a good deal and work very well in urban environments. Don't trail ride them.