But hopefully these speculations will give a new forum member pause about this CT silliness.
Lets remember that this thread has always been about sharing information so people can make an informed choice to do this, or not. "Silliness" describes a lot of the posts in this thread.
The real value is with the first hand experiences shared here, which includes Doug's tire damage from running on a flat tire
and the crack, which can't be shown to be a result of CT use, or a meaningless event that had nothing to do with CT use. The individual readers are left to make that assumption on their own, lacking further information, testing or developments.
I'm not a darksider, but I play one on TV. Actually I should say I'm not a darksider yet. I do plan to try a CT when my supply of PR2s runs out.
This discussion reminds me of one that occurred on a Honda Magna forum. In 1983 when the Magna came out, it had bias-ply tires. In the early 2000s, someone discovered that there were radials that would fit the rim. People pointed out many of the same issues as are being pointed out by the nay-sayers here, one of them being the legal liability issue because the manufacturer didn'tt recommend radials on that model; also that the shape of the rim and the bead wouldn't hold air properly and/or wouldn't keep the tire on the rim under heavy use. One minor difference between that earlier thread and this: one potential problem mentioned in that earlier thread was that the radials' different riding characteristics might stress the frame in ways it wasn't engineered to tolerate and cause it to crack. Ultimately none of those proved to be an issue, and people who mounted appropriately sized radials got better performance, better gas mileage, more comfortable rides, and longer-lasting tires.
There were a couple of major differences. though, between that earlier, Magna thread and this one: that discussion was calm and composed, with no one feeling the necessity to trot out a parade of horribles describing the imminent demise of our way of life if anyone mounted a radial; and also in that earlier thread, concerned people were satisfied to point out their concerns, once, and then let others weigh the risks and make up their own minds as though they were intelligent, mature, responsible adults, without repeatedly haranguing them. In the end, lots of people mounted radials on their Magnas, no one had any problems, the radials were superior in every conceivable way, and when there were accidents, no one ever reported being asked by anyone what kind of tires they were running.
As to this current case, here's the real question: Did the tire lose air because of the crack, or did the tire lose air for some other reason and was the crack caused by riding miles on the flat? In thinking about this, and in the absence of any evidence either way, of all the possibilities that latter one strikes me as the most likely.
If there's a serious takeaway from this report of the CT going flat and the subsequently discovered crack--and I doubt we'll ever know what actually happened--it's that the CT can disguise and dull the rider's awareness of bad tire conditions. It seems to me that that is something that those considering mounting CTs or those already riding on CTs need to keep in mind when they're weighing the risks/rewards of this particular choice and while they're riding their CTs once they've made their decision to mount/ride a CT.
