WikiPedalia is not endorsed or affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Tire
People usually think that tires are made of rubber. This is understandable, because rubber is all that you can see.
A tire is actually made up of three parts:
- The beads are two hoops of strong steel wire (or, sometimes Kevlar ®.)
- The cords are cloth, forming the body of the tire, woven between the two beads. Most modern tires use nylon cords.
- The rubber covers all the other parts. The rubber on the part that contacts the road is thicker, and is called the tread.
A bicycle tire is not airtight by itself, so it uses an inner tube, which is basically a doughnut-shaped rubber balloon. The inner tube has a valve to allow you to blow it up. (Some newer tires are tubeless, like car tires, but tubeless tires are not very common as of yet. There is a complication in that the tire beads are much narrower than with car tires, so it is harder to form a seal. Time will tell.
This site includes an extensive article on Tires and also an article explaining the different Tire Sizing systems.
