kenda 270 v shinko 244

[Jeffrey Parker]

Interesting thread, especially since I live in Shanghai. Though China makes obscene numbers of motorcycles, pushing 15 or 20 million a year, there are not many big bikes here; most are 250cc or under. So it's really hard to get decent rubber for my Jialing JH600. After working through several long "tire threads" in this forum, I resolved to go for Jeff Khoury's fave, the Kenda K761 -- yes, the one you used to be able to get for under $100 a set. Not so easy in China. Not to be confused with the inferior K671, which is made in the mainland, the K761 is made in Taiwan, which is where Kenda is based. I went to great pains to order a shipment of the K761 for me and some JH600 buddies from the factory in Taiwan, and our shipment got as far as Shanghai customs, where it was turned away for lack of a Ministry of Transportation street certificate. That misadventure took five months to sort out, and we were fortunate that Shanghai customs relented from their original plan to destroy the tires as contraband. I'm now quite happily running the K761s on my Jialing, front and back. I bought them online from Don Kirk in the US, and hand carried them to Shanghai from San Francisco in the original cardboard carton; no issues at the border, thank you. The price was pretty good, about $120 for the set with shipping, if you don't count my round-trip trans-Pacific air fare. And think of this: Shanghai is just a few hundred km from Taiwan as the airliner flies (and, yes, it's now possible to fly directly between Taiwan and the mainland after six decades of prohibition), but to get a set of Kenda K761s onto my bike in Shanghai they had to fly from Taiwan to the Don Kirk warehouse somewhere in the US, then to my sister's place north of the Golden Gate Bridge, then back to almost where they started in the belly of my SFO-PVG jumbo. That's quite a carbon footprint. All of which is to say that, no, the Kendas are not made in Korea. The best ones are made in Taiwan. Lesser models are made in mainland China and perhaps elsewhere. Cheers! Jeff

On Feb 16, 2012, at 10:21 AM, John Weisgerber wrote: > My KLR has Shinko 705s front and rear. No complaints whatsoever for highway commuting so far. I had been told that Shinko was a Korean company that took over motorcycle tire production from Yokohama. Further digging shows that to be mostly true: > "Established in 1946, the Shinko Group began as a manufacturer of > bicycle tires and tubes in Osaka, Japan that today has become a > burgeoning manufacture of rubber products.In 1998 the Shinko Group purchased the motorcycle tire technology > and molds from Yokohama Rubber Co., and began production of these > products under the Shinko Tire brand. With manufacturing based in South > Korea and design based in Japan, the company has seamlessly combined > Japanese engineering and design principles with South Korean production > and quality control standards." > http://www.shinkotireusa.com/about.php > > Cheers, > > John > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

[Eckert, Christopher (Infrastructure Solut]

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