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review

Maxxis Re-Fuse 27.5 x 2.0 gravel tyre

8
£49.99

VERDICT:

8
10
Grippy, predictable and easy to fit, with acceptable weight and cost, these are a great choice for going fat
Weight: 
632g

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The Maxxis Re-Fuse is an excellent choice for mixing road with gravel or dry-ish off-road riding. Tubeless-ready, with oodles of volume, it means you really can choose fast, grippy and puncture-proof.

I can see the time we are living through being marked by cycling historians a century hence as The Rise Of Practical. There is now a plethora of bike, tyre and kit options to facilitate riding on any surface, in any condition, without significant compromise. This began at the humble chainstay yoke, when frame designers began to make more space available – first for 25 then 28mm road tyres. Now the floodgates have opened and I, personally, wouldn't recommend purchasing a new bike that takes less than 35mm rubber on a 19mm internal-width rim, lest you narrow your options for future use or resale.

> Find your nearest dealer here or here

> Buy these online here

The science is in, and Fat Is Fast. Thanks to the likes of Bicycling Magazine and their endless measurements we know that lower pressures and wider tyres are faster than hard, narrow tyres in real-world, non-Swiss road environments – and the benefits of tubeless puncture resistance and lower overall weight are well proven.

So if you have a frame with tons of tyre clearance and a desire to get dusty, what rubber? It's hard to go past the Maxxis Re-Fuse as an excellent choice if you like your trails dry-ish.

Maxxis Re-Fuse_4.JPG

Another benefit of practical frames is the ability to swap between different wheel sizes. With disc brakes now the norm rather than the exception for any bike going off-road, the position of a brake calliper in relation to a rim is no longer a limiting factor. I tested the Maxxis Re-Fuse on the rather excellent Bombtrack Hook EXT – a bike designed to take either 650B rims with huge tyres or 700C rims with more traditionally sized rubber.

Maxxis Re-Fuse_2.JPG

In the case of the Re-Fuse, the tested 650B/27.5in size is a hefty 632g per tyre – so over 1.2kg for a set before adding sealant if you're going tubeless. Compare this with the comparably-excellent Schwalbe S-One in 700C 30mm guise at half the weight and you can see there's a price to pay for more rubber.

Of course the smaller-diameter 650B rim and shorter spokes have less mass (there's typically around 60g between the smallest 26in and largest 700C rims), but generally, weight-wise, volume costs. That's if you care, mind – the Hook EXT is a steel frame and over 11kg all-up. Maxxis does the Re-Fuse in a 700 x 32mm (390g) or 700 x 40mm (520g) – so if you can fit 'em, go fat.

Installing the Re-Fuses onto the Hook's WTB Tubeless-Ready rims was a cinch – fingers-only to get both beads in place, and a test inflate had the beads popping into the rim channels without any sealant and holding air, first time. This is the beauty of product evolution and system-orientated thinking – tubeless has grown up, and there's simply no reason to think that if you're using tubeless-ready components that it's any more of a faff than using an inner tube.

Maxxis Re-Fuse_3.JPG

The Re-Fuse measured 47mm wide on a 19mm internal-width rim – this is on the decidedly claret-coloured side of Sheldon Brown's Bible Of Tyre-Rim Width Compatibility – but, as St Sheldon caveats, you can go larger if the system works. In the case of Re-Fuse on WTB 19mm rim it worked well indeed – I had to push very hard into corners to get any feedback the tyre was unduly deforming, and even then the sensation was not a panicked one where the tyre wall collapsed in a cliff-edge manner, more a 'This is as far as we go, chum' friendly warning.

Off the 37mm end of the tyre-pressure-science chart we are into uncharted waters, and the evolution of wider rims and tubeless tyres with ever-more-supple sidewalls means you need to experiment. For my first outing the Thumb Test (Press. Suck teeth. Hum. Say something like 'I believe that is satisfactory') led me to think 25psi in the back and 21.5 in the front would do for our all-up 87kg rider-bike weight – and not to blow my own trumpet, but that was spot on.

> How to fit a tubeless tyre

On a two-hour blast on dry-ish bridleways and roads, the Re-Fuse were fast and dead quiet. They let go in deep mud, but this was never tackled at speed anyway, and the predominant off-road dewy-grassed 'damp' was no problem. On the road there was no sensation of pedal-induced bouncing, while over grass and chalk I could change lines easily and confidently at speed.

On the Bombtrack Hook, thanks to its long wheelbase slips at the front or rear were recoverable, and the Re-Fuses always found something to bite. They stayed connected when powering up technical sections seated, helped by the low pressure and supple sidewalls.

> Buyers Guide: Tubeless tyres – all your options

Over the rest of the test period, rambling all over Hampshire's bridleways, byways and lanes, the Re-Fuses consistently impressed. No, you won't be taking these to a cyclo-cross race or into deep winter's mud, but that's the beauty of modern system-based products – the process of swapping out for a more aggressive tread pattern is the work of minutes, with tubeless sealant easily recycled from one tyre to the next using a simple syringe.

We're big fans of Schwalbe's G-One tyres, and the Maxxis Re-Fuse 27.5 x 2in sits nicely between its 1.5in and 2.8in offerrings, at comparable weight and cost. I'd say you'd be hard-pushed to tell the difference between the Schwalbes and Maxxis, and that's high praise for the latter.

Verdict

Grippy, predictable and easy to fit, with acceptable weight and cost, these are a great choice for going fat

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road.cc test report

Make and model: Maxxis Re-Fuse 27.5 x 2.0 gravel tyre

Size tested: 27.5 x 2.0

Tell us what the product is for, and who it's aimed at. What do the manufacturers say about it? How does that compare to your own feelings about it?

It's large-volume tyre for tubeless shenanigans, on or off-road.

Maxxis says:

Our most popular training tyre, modernized with tubeless technology and higher volumes for even more reliability and comfort. The familiar diamond tread pattern keeps things rolling smoothly even as the pavement crumbles into gravel and hardpack dirt.

Our most popular training tyre - providing excellent traction, durability and plenty of road miles in any condition. Maxx Shield helps provide a tire that Re-Fuses to puncture.

MaxxShield offers bead-to-bead protection

Folding bead

Available in a choice of colours

Tell us some more about the technical aspects of the product?

1. RIM SIZE 27.5

2. WIDTH 2.00

3. TPI 60

4. BEAD Folding

5. PLY Single Ply

6. COMPOUND MaxxShield

COLOUR Black

TECH MaxxShield/TR

Rate the product for quality of construction:
 
9/10

Can't fault it.

Rate the product for performance:
 
8/10

Predictable, fast, as grippy as can be expected given the pattern.

Rate the product for durability:
 
9/10

The compound is unscarred – and that's some doing for a tyre this grippy, and the speed and surfaces I've run it at.

Rate the product for weight (if applicable)
 
6/10

I'm calling these sufficient, not amazing.

Rate the product for comfort (if applicable)
 
10/10

Lots of air. Super-comfy.

Rate the product for value:
 
7/10

At £50 the value is good, at the oft-available £36 it's fabulous.

Tell us how the product performed overall when used for its designed purpose

Very well indeed.

Tell us what you particularly liked about the product

Predictability. No surprises.

Tell us what you particularly disliked about the product

Nothing.

Did you enjoy using the product? Yes

Would you consider buying the product? Yes

Would you recommend the product to a friend? Yes

Use this box to explain your score

These are great tyres. Really great. The consistently 4.5-star Schwalbe equivalents are also great. Seeing as that's the benchmark, I'm going with 4 stars, as compared with its peers the Re-Fuse isn't 'exceptional', it's very good, and up there with the best.

Overall rating: 8/10

About the tester

Age: 43  Height: 183cm  Weight: 72kg

I usually ride: Merida Ride 5000 Disc  My best bike is:

I've been riding for: Over 20 years  I ride: A few times a week  I would class myself as: Expert

I regularly do the following types of riding: cyclo cross, club rides, general fitness riding, mountain biking, Dutch bike pootling

Living in the Highlands, Mike is constantly finding innovative and usually cold/wet ways to accelerate the degradation of cycling kit. At his happiest in a warm workshop holding an anodised tool of high repute, Mike's been taking bikes apart and (mostly) putting them back together for forty years. With a day job in global IT (he's not completely sure what that means either) and having run a boutique cycle service business on the side for a decade, bikes are his escape into the practical and life-changing for his customers.

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7 comments

Avatar
Stiphodon | 5 years ago
0 likes

Anyone have longterm feedback on these. I've had both pairs (700x32c) I bought delaminate or form large bubles under the tread. Tyres are less than 1yr old, set up tubeless,  my wife and I bikepacked on them for around 1000kms , 95% sealed road, 5 % gravel. Pressures have been run at ~ 60PSI. Have emailed maxxis nnumerous times, but no reply. The LBS I bought them from unfortunately went bust. Surely I am not the only one to have this problem with these, especially since it happened to both pairs? Unless maybe I got a bad batch.........

Avatar
kevvjj replied to Stiphodon | 5 years ago
0 likes
Stiphodon wrote:

Anyone have longterm feedback on these. I've had both pairs (700x32c) I bought delaminate or form large bubles under the tread. Tyres are less than 1yr old, set up tubeless,  my wife and I bikepacked on them for around 1000kms , 95% sealed road, 5 % gravel. Pressures have been run at ~ 60PSI. Have emailed maxxis nnumerous times, but no reply. The LBS I bought them from unfortunately went bust. Surely I am not the only one to have this problem with these, especially since it happened to both pairs? Unless maybe I got a bad batch.........

What sealant are you using? I remember (quite a while back now) there were issues with Maxxis MTB tyres doing exactly this when using ammonia based sealants (like Stan's at the time, which I think is now ammonia free).

Avatar
FatBoyW | 6 years ago
0 likes

Should this have a hypen in it - utter rubbish!!!  Not into this gravel stuff but it does sound extraordinarily heavy - 1.2Kg plus sealant for a pair of tyres - wheres my e-bike!!!

Avatar
KiwiMike replied to FatBoyW | 6 years ago
0 likes
FatBoyW wrote:

Should this have a hypen in it - utter rubbish!!!  Not into this gravel stuff but it does sound extraordinarily heavy - 1.2Kg plus sealant for a pair of tyres - wheres my e-bike!!!

as mentioned, the weight is on par for the size of tyre. More rubber weighs more, and these are close to benchmark Schwalbe offerings. 

...and anyone serious about going fast, on gravel or dry offroad doesn't care about 600g, because the alternative is a much narrower, harder, less efficient,  less grippy, less comfortable tyre. 

Avatar
700c | 6 years ago
0 likes

this thing weighs more than my whole front wheel!  3 

Avatar
sunnyape | 6 years ago
0 likes

I have a Re-Fuse on my front wheel at the moment for training. I want to replace it with something better as soon as it wears out... but it just won't die!

Avatar
madcarew | 6 years ago
0 likes

The old maxxis Re-fuse road tyre was one of my favourite training tyres. Grippy, reliable, didn't puncture too easily, and was one of the cheapest on the shelf. 

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