K60
To be honest, the new "Made in Korea" TKC80s are more to the crap side.
Doing Central-America my TKC80 rear was worn in less than 6000km, front maybe did around 10 000. With their thin and soft walls they pick up punctures like there's no tomorrow and they're hard to repair since the ultra-soft walls don't put much counterpressure on the repair plug to keep it properly sealed for a longer term.
Heidenau K60 seems to be the best pick for boxer GS in tubeless if you want some worthy loose surface grip while wanting them to last on tar roads.
They come in smaller width though: 100/90 front and 140/80 rear but it's within R850/1100/1150/1200GS rim spec that allows +/-1 size width variation on Behr cross-spoke tubless rims. I know they got too popular so Heidenau has plans making them in the original 110/150 width sizes, not sure if they've started distributing them yet or not. Do your homework on this matter.
K60s are amazingly durable for a knobby type of a tire. I get around 25 - 30 000km out of front and 13 - 20 000km from rear depending on the "hard-handness" on the throttle grip. And that's 2-up with full gear!
Their walls is almost twice the thickness of TKC80, and considerably harder - hard as hell in fact. I've done over 100 000km on K60s, half on gravel roads and I've never picked up a puncture on a healthy K60 tire! I rode 2000km from Iran to the middle of Turkey on K60 basically on textile (no rubber left), and I still didn't get any puncture.
Cons: as on any knobby type of tire - you got to be more careful on the wet tarmac and steep curves. Also although the max speed is rated to 160km/h (100mph) it's only for single rider on a light bike. With full gear loaded bike I'd say maximum allowed speed is around 130-140km/h max, doing more than that all day will cause the rear tire to overheat and starting to crack (been there done that - I wrote to Heidenau about this, sent those shocking pictures and I heard they changed the K60 rubber mixture some time after that, but it didn't improved that much, so the max speed rating is still below for fully loaded bikes). So keep your speeds low crossing that fast European autbahn on the way to third-world where the speeds are low anyway.
Anyways, I maybe too biased towards the K60s (and currently crying, since I can't get them in Americas), but they are definately a type of tires to seriously consider for a typical African/Asian/Australian/South-American dirt&tar road fusion abusing under torquey R1xx0GSes that eats those other wannabe DualSport tires too well if you're hard on that throttle.
Ride safe, Margus
Last edited by Margus; 25 Jun 2009 at 21:19.
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