Proper width replacement 26x2.125 tires?

[Superman1984]

I'm just over 6'3" and 300 lbs. The Carlisle tires say 32 psi max, with all the age showing on them I don't dare take them over that.
The Cheng Shin GY tread tires on the Schwinn are 45 psi max. The Schwinn weighs a bit more than the Columbia with the Carlisle tires too.
With the Cheng Shin tires at the same pressure, they don't squat nearly as much as the Carlisle tires. I run them at the max pressure though because I've had them drop down into the rim a bit at 32 psi. The soft, sagging Carlisle tires are easier to push down the road than the fully inflated 45 psi Cheng Shin tires.
When I got the Schwinn, it had a set of never ridden on Carlisle knobby white walls from the late 70's or so. They had a max pressure of 32 psi on the sidewalls.
Those things were like pedaling in mud. I had stuck a set of modern tread flame tires on it after I first went through the whole bike and it rode great, but the flame tires looked bad out of place on an old Schwinn and I hated the white walls. They were also small for their marked 2.125" size.
I bought the CS tires in black because it was all I could find that was black and not made for a mountain bike. They pedal harder than the old knobby Carlisle tires it came with. A buddy of mine has four similar Schwinn bikes, he has one with old Carlisle tires he bought new old stock, two with the newer brick tread tires he got online, and one with original Schwinn 'Westwind' brick tread tires he bought from someone who was repopping them 20 years ago.
The Carlisle Lightning tires are the best ride, the newer brick tread tires are okay, but the original Westwind repops are the best all around.

I don't think the Schwinn style brick tread would look right on my Columbia, its a plain black bike, no tank, no chrome, so it needs black period correct tires.
The chain tires would be great but I'm not spending $70 for a pair of tires for a bike.
It'll stay just the way it is with the old Carlisle tires until something better turns up for a price I can afford. If the GY tread tires were cheap, I'd probably throw a set on it just so it could be ridden without worrying about a tire splitting open.

I was trying to help but I am going No Comment Silent on this topic.

 

[dirtman]

This may be a dumb question after all this discussion as to tires for this bike, but since I was told that this bike is a 'Goodyear Highway Patrol' model, would that mean it would have come new with Goodyear tires back in 1949?

 

[kunzog]

It's hard to find balloon tire tubes anymore. like tire manufactures keep making them narrower and narrower. just look at some old tubes, they were really fat!

 

[bloo]

Someone must be making a Carlisle copy now because I saw brand new JC Higgins bikes with them at one of the hardware stores over the last Christmas holiday. But all had wide whitewalls.

That's interesting on a whole bunch of levels. Where did you see that?

 

[dirtman]

They were on this model bike, this particular one had a different tread, something similar to one of the current Kenda tires but with Allstate scripting on the side.
I've run across 5 or 6 of these in the past two years for sale at yardsales and flea markets here, all used but in fairly new looking shape. I'm pretty sure I saw something above Pacific Cycles on the seat post on one of them.
It really didn't sink in when I saw the first one, but the use of the JC Higgins name, caught my eye, especially since they starting popping up quite a while after Sears closed up their last even somewhat local store. They've been gone from this area for about 5 years now, and haven't carried bicycles for 15 years here.

Some of these have fenders, two that I saw had shorty chrome fenders, one had somewhat full length fenders that were speckled a bit with rust. None that I saw had any rust on the rims, bars, or stem, which is rare here especially if its used at the shore.
Every one I saw was marked way too high to just buy it as a curiosity, most wanted $100 or so. If it were $50, I'd likely have brought it home just for a closer look. Being from Pacific it's not likely anything special but I'd like to know where they were getting the tires from.

This one was on CL, about a half hour out of Philly about a month or so ago.
The bike is nothing special but the old school tires got my attention, although I'm not after any
whitewall tires right now.
The tires looked like Kenda K130's but with a bit more width and 'Allstate' on the side.
A buddy of mine who collects old motorcycles said "Allstate" motorcycle tires are available again for vintage motorbikes, so maybe there's a connection there?
Someone else said maybe they were sold in Kmart, but they too have been gone from here for quite a while, probably 10 years now. I only saw one with Allstate, the rest all had Carlisle Lightning Dart knockoffs. (I didn't notice if they had "Carlisle" on the sides or not, at a quick glance, I didn't see any sidewall brand. Those too were white sidewalls.

 

[dirtman]

I should also note that the first one of these I saw was at one of the big box home centers, the one that sells Craftsman, right before Christmas one year. They had two or three chained up out front near the "Exit" door. I remember them because I thought it odd they were selling bikes, let alone bikes badges JC Higgins, but I didn't see any inside, at least no where I had been. The weather was cold and raining so I walked right by them thinking they were idiots for both leaving them outside and not putting them inside where folks would spot them BEFORE they checked out. I never saw bikes there again. It was around the time they were selling a few other 'retro' styled items from Sears, one being a tool box with the old Craftsman logo. I think it was their first Christmas with the Craftsman line on display.

 

[SKPC]

In terms of looking correct, or that they must be "affordable" or for sure limits your options. If this dictates your decision,. then you are stuck with heavy, cheap tires and "the horror" of whitewalls.-did I say that? Heavy tires slow you down considerably, but if just cruising along with zero hills or in the flats requiring little to no effort, then the heavier, cheaper(and heavy) tires will work just fine. I would suggest looking for some lightweight (under 800 grams) 2.4 kevlar bead tires that may cost a bit of money, but you most likely will be happier if you saved a few more bucks and ponied up for some nice kevlar bead blackwalls. Keith Bontrager said about bike components along the lines of...... "You can't have cheap, light and strong together at the same time". But, you can have "heavy, weak and cheap", or "light, weak and cheap", "heavy, strong and cheap" or alternatively for the long run, "expensive, light, and strong"....This was said years ago and still holds true today!
In terms of width....as fat as possible. Be aware nearly ALL 26"(559) tires have the width listed as total BS.

 

[dirtman]

As I see it my only choices are either Duro/Kenda/Sunlite/Cheng Shin Goodyear diamond pattern blackwalls, Schwinn bw "Westwind" style brick tread, or the reproduction chaintread tires available here. All others seam to only come in whitewall only or have a modern tread or style.
I see three requirements in a balloon tire
1. Blackwall only
2. Look like it could of come on the bike when it was new
3. Price

I consider bikes like these 'Occasional riders' and not a main source of transportation. On a retired income I can't justify spending more on the tires than I did on the bike.
Once all the pandemic craze is over, if tires and other parts don't come down, I'll just part these out on fleabay.

With what they want for tires, I'll just be using the new old stock Western Flyer tires on the CWC, Western Flyer, and maybe the Davis tires on the Westfield. The WF tires feel like new, their not hard or dry rotted at all. I'm not sure how old they are, but they say
Western Auto Kansas City, MO on them.
I unwrapped a set, the profile is alot like the Carlisle Lightning and they look super wide compared to the Asian made Goodyear tread tires.

 

[bloo]

I don't know how old those Western Flyers are, but I bought a 26 inch set of them new in 1976 for my first 26 inch balooner. I was 11 years old and wanting fat balloon tires. I was extremely disappointed with them after mounting because I thought they looked too skinny. In my opinion they made the bike look almost like a middleweight parked next to my 24 inch Huffy ballooner with very old Allstate Safety Tread tires. In 1980, parked next to my best friend's beach cruiser with Lightning Darts, the difference was glaring. The good news or the bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that the tread never wore out. It wasn't for lack of trying.

I measured one of them last year, and they are not undersize so I guess it's all an optical illusion. Or, maybe they have grown due to all the cracking?

.

 

[dirtman]

I had to go measure my Carlisle Lightning Darts on the Columbia. I get 58.28mm at about 25 psi, they're cracked a bit but mostly on the tread not so much on the sides. I don't have the WF tires on rims so taking a measurement wouldn't be a good comparison.
The WF tires are very similar in that they have a narrower tread band and huge sidewall area. The contact width is the same as the Carlisle tires, as are the 'corners'. They're so close in measurement that I'd venture to guess they used the same casing, or maybe the WF were made by Carlisle? They're the same tire that I took off the CWC wheels, but those were rotted beyond any chance of use, one tire was split on the corner and the tube had come out, the other had turned gummy in only one spot as if it had gotten soaked in oil or gas for a long time.
Back in the day, around this area Carlisle tires were the most common, with Firestone or Allstate being the next most popular. Once in a while you would find a bike with something different on it. US Chain or Uniroyal tires were common on Schwinn's for some reason, I'm not sure why, and by the time I was old enough to mess with larger bikes, those tires were already old.
I remember buying new Carlisle Lightnings as late as 1976 or so, but they were already hard to find. The knobby tread was more common for some reason. From what I remember, Carlisle, WF, Davis, and Firestone all had sort of a narrow tread but wide sidewalls.
Funny thing is I never remember seeing any 'Goodyear' style tires back then, the local Goodyear dealer here sold Carlisle bike tires.

For now, the way I see it is I already own the WF tires, so they'll get used on the '36? Western Flyer by CWC when I get the wheels done. I'll leave the Lightning Darts on the Columbia for now but need to find something period correct for the Westfield frame if I decide to build it.
I was originally thinking of just selling the older WF tires and running only new tires so I could ride it without concern of ruining a vintage tire but for what tires are selling for, its cheaper to just run the tires I have.