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I'm a weekend warrior type of mountain biker, but in the interests of fitness, I'm starting to ride my bike to work more often. I bought some slicks for the all-paved ride to work, but I'll still need my knobby tires for weekend trail rides. Is it ok for me to change my tires a lot? I guess I'll be swapping the slicks for my usual tires once a week at least.

The right solution is probably to get a complete second set of wheels, but for that price I almost might as well get a cheapo bike for commuting. I'm not really willing to commit that much cash until I find out if I'm going to be able to keep up with regular riding to work.

Thanks for your suggestions and opinions - I don't want to damage my tires by constantly swapping them out!

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2 Answers

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Besides the above mentioned Rim-pinches there is no real problem, unless as stated before you are using tubeless.

Something you might want to consider is changing to a more versatile tyre. I run Maxxis crossmax exception series, as tubeless, I train in the mornings on the road and on weekends use them when we are off road.

I did the training wheelset thing for a while but unless you are willing to take out some cash and have exactly the same wheelset (hubs, rotors, rims etc.) it can be quite a pain. I used to have Mavic crossride disk wheels as training wheels and Fulcrum Redmetal 5's as my off-road wheels. Mavics had shimano rotors and Fulcrums had avid rotors (I run juicy 5 brakes). When I changed to the Mavics I had to re-allign the calipers everytime, and being a perfectionist this was an issue.

Using a more versatile tyre might be the cheaper, less troublesome solution.

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I guess that you are not running tubeless (see this question) so I don't see any problem changing tyres often. One risk is that you can cause a pinch flat when changing tyres and if you do that often the risk is quite high. Besides the inconvenience of changing tyres I don't see any problem. However I think you will be better off in the long run getting a separate set of wheels (perhaps second-hand) for commuting as you might decide to go tubeless on your MTB tyres and tubeless conversion do not like to be removed often.

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