New Tire Blues: Stratoliner Version

[alanmcorcoran]

Not sure if this will be of any interest, but it seems like tires, and the search for them, is a perennial favorite...

I'm planning on an extended trip/tour when I get back to Anaheim about ten days from now. Not sure how far I'll be going but I figured somewhere between 1K-2K. So, I brought my beastie in to have the oil changed and get a few things checked and I asked the service guy if he thought I had 2K worth of tread left on my Dunlops. He took a look and said, "hard to tell, but I'd say more like 1K." I'd run them a few hundred miles here and there underinflated, plus I had 9K on them, and near as I can figure, 10K is about where things start to get interesting for a lot of MC tires. These are low profile tubeless.

Yamaha only recommends one pair of tires (Dunlops) for the Strat. Turns out, his supplier only sells the front size. The rear is apparently only available from Yamaha. Under the heading of "Things You Guys Probably Already Know" comes the fact that, if you get the tires from a distributor they are about half the price as what the MC manufacturer charges. And the rear is the expensive one. Anyway, he had some equivalently sized Bridgestones and he seemed both knowledgeable and trustworthy so I went with those. He mentioned the tread might feel a little different. I'm hoping it feels just like the Dunlops, cause they were pretty awesome while they lasted. I wasn't able to collect the bike back from Mission Motorsports before I had to fly out, so I won't get a chance to try them until a week from Friday.