Review: Panaracer GravelKing tires

Now that the local parks are open to Mountain Bikes again, we've been resuming our almost weekly cadence of mountain bike trips. My wife's Cheviot was not quite a mountain bike, having come with 33mm nifty swifty tires which aren't actually particularly swift.

I looked for wider tires and bought some Panaracer Gravel King tires. The product managers idiotically created several sizes and types of tires but gave them all the same name, so you have to be careful when you order tires what to get.

I started with the Gravel King SK+ 1.90 tires. These have knobbies and barely clear the Cheviot frame and brakes, but made such an awful noise that my wife asked for them to be removed and replaced with the nifty swifty because she'd rather put up with poor traction on the mountain bike trail than listen to those tires.

Upon switching to the 1.75 version of those tires, all those complaints disappeared, the tires cleared the frame better, and the rolling resistance was also much better. Get these, and not the knobby versions for an all-round bike.