Thanks for the links, John. I do like intelligent, well-spoken people exercising their obsessions, much like walking their poodles, and with approximately the same result, road hazard here and there. I'll believe that a Grand Bois tyre is not a Panasela with a vanity imprint as and when I receive an independent lab report with a structural and chemical analysis, not a few bicyclists' subjective impressions. I enjoyed the comparison to dear Grant, though it is unfair to dismiss him as merely a salesman. He's another obsessive who has thought his thing through to the logical end and acted on it. And he's a far more agreeable writer than Heine, who lectures.
As for the hostility in that thread to puncture-proof tyres, no matter how elegantly expressed, and the barely veiled claim that they must perforce be slower, technically it's nonsense spouted by wishful thinkers fighting a rearguard action. Tyres aren't about the street corner myths that arose in the largely uneducated ur-history of bicycling, but about achievable point-to-point times, and any time one spends fixing flats one isn't cycling, merely indulging masochism. Anyway, the most interesting thing is that Heine knows it: despite the rhetoric, the width of those Grand Bois tyres increases by leaps and bounds, almost by the minute. Next a protection layer will creep in, and be declared to have some magic quality, kevlar rubbed on the thighs of virgin cyclists at the full moon. Shortly afterwards the Grand Bois brand will emanate from a Schwalbe factory. Want to indulge in a small wager? Ten bucks that within two years the Grand Bois acquire a protection layer?
