I'm going to revive this thread, please bear with me on the long message: The STI's have been absolutely bullet proof. I abused the hell out of them and had no issues. Fast forward the tape to Fall of 2022 I tore a huge gash in the side wall of my rear passenger tire. Not sure what I hit, but must have been a hunk of metal on the trail.
Thanks to the sidewall slug, I got from
@Hondasxs I was able to limp 20 plus miles out of the woods. Thanks Richard!
Anyway, I end up getting the machine home and seeing how the tire was not going to be repairable I need to get at least two new tires. I go to order them and find that HighLifter has bought the STI name. OK, no big deal I ordered two of them and put them on.
Then in March of 23 I order three more tires and a wheel to act as a spare. Yay, new shoes all the way around for the P1K and a spare! When I ordered and received those, all three were branded as STI. My initial thought was oh great, I got tires that have been sitting around in a warehouse.
But have had no issues until this past Fall (2023). Went on the same trip with my son as I had the last year when the sidewall tear happened. Great trip, no issues. But a few days after I got back, one of the tires (again passenger rear) was flat. Found a very small slit on the side wall, didn't appear to be any deeper than the outer layer/ply of the tire. But it was leaking. It also looked like the outer ply was delaminating and I suspected it was a defective tire. I got it patched at a local shop, but it has now started to have a slow leak again.
Now this Spring same thing on another tire. Slow leak. But no apparent damage on the outside sidewall. Then I looked at the inside and found it was all bulged out with the outer layer delaminating. The attached pics show the inside of the tire with bulging all over it.
In both cases, it is the HighLifter branded tires that are delaminating and the STI ones are still fine.
Has anyone experienced this? Edit: I've reached out to HL to see what kind of response I get. But just wondering if this is common or I just got (un) lucky.