Review: Delium Tires - Final Word

  Note: Delium Tire sent over two pairs of tires to Guitar Ted Productions at no cost. I am not being paid, nor bribed, for this review and I will always strive to give my honest thoughts and opinions throughout.

Delium Tire is a fairly unknown name in bicycle tires to most riders, and likely to you as well. The company is based in Indonesia and claims to be that country's largest tire producer. I am told that Delium Tire has made tires under other, more well known to cyclists brands, but I have no idea which brands that those might be. 

Does Delium have what it will take to move brands like Maxxis, WTB, Specialized, or Schwalbe off a bit to make room for sales for their gravel tires? 

Certainly the prices for their tires doesn't hurt in that cause. However; while there are certain good things about the Delium gravel tires I have tried here, there are some definite concerns as well. 

You can read a bit about those concerns HERE in my last update. There is a link in that post to the introduction with the specs and prices as well which you can check out. In this final post I am going to give you a bit more on the riding performance of the AllRounder and Speed-X tires. Then I will give my final verdict on the tires at the end.

Both sets of Delium Tires ended up feeling fast and well damped on gravel.

Okay, so out of the two sets of tires I received for this review I ended up liking the Speed-X the best. The AllRounder, the tire that looks so close to a Gravel King SK it is scary, was a bit too rounded in profile for my liking. I thought the rounded casing made the tire feel unstable and it had trouble in looser gravel and wet mud laterally, losing grip and sliding sideways, or getting kicked sideways by a bigger rock, for instance. I will say this tire felt fast and easy to spin up. I will give the AllRounder that much. 

The Speed-X was a more stable tire in the same conditions and it had a really nice ability to absorb rock and therefore it felt very smooth. I think the AllRounder has a similar casing, but the rounded profile the tire has sort of extinguishes its abilities in this regard. 

I probably could live with either tire in terms of ride quality though. Both exceed expectations for a tire costing as little as these do. However; one characteristic of both tires is a bit concerning to me. This would be the ability, or lack thereof, for these tires to retain air pressure. 

Initially both sets weren't good in this regard. However; as I tended to want to ride the Speed-X more, I thought I had ridden the tire enough that air retention was no issue. Then I parked that bike and got on the AllRounder which, as I expected, had almost zero air pressure in them after about a month. I rode the AllRounder a few times and checked on the Speed-X and.... The back tire was flat! Maddening. The front had air but was down significantly as well. 

The AllRounder copies the Gravel King right down to how it throws small stones.

I guess you are good to go if you ride the Deliums every day or nearly so, but let the bike sit for a week and the tires loose a significant amount of air. By the way, I'm using WTB sealant which has proven to work really well in every other application I have used the sealant in before. 

Final Word: I really like the Speed-X tires, and if they held air better I would highly recommend these. For the asking price these tires definitely ride and perform on gravel better than you would expect. The AllRounder is, as the name suggests, "round" in profile. Too much so for my tastes. This doesn't mean other folks might not like this tire, but given the poor air retention issues I am seeing, I find it hard to recommend these tires. And then again - why not just buy a Gravel King SK and be done with it?

So, from where I sit, Delium has work to do to crack the crowded market for gravel tires. I would suggest working on a better tubeless set up experience, better air retention, and maybe ditch the AllRounder for a design of their own. These tires are not bad tires. These tires do have some undesirable quirks and because of that, I think these are a pass for gravel riders as they are now. If Delium decides to pursue the issues I am seeing and address them in new models, I might then be of a mind to change my view on their tires. 

Note: I wrote this final take several days ago. Since then both sets of tires seem to be holding air better. Go figure! Well, at any rate, even if this seems to hold up, the tires are inconsistent and take far too long to settle in. I may come back with an update at some point.....