Interested in knowing what tyre pressures you guys use for normal road use with:
standard size wheels and tyres
one up only and no luggage
normal tarmac roads (with the customary potholes

29/32 psi on my Z with stock wheels and tyre sizes (Metzler Enduro 3 Sahara).

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2.5 front, 3.0 rear

are these higher than in your handbook? mine says 29psi/ 2 bar

why do you guys run the rear higher? specially 3 bar = 42 psi!

Handbook pressures for the Z are 30 psi front and 33 psi rear, so mine are actually 1 psi less than recommended for solo road use. Not sure about Dual's 2.5/3 bar (35/42 psi) - that does seem a tad on the high side! However, each to the own - we're all different.

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front 32, rear 34

Bearing the handbook guidance in mind, and it is just guidance, I'd be interested to know what your reason/thinking is behind running your tyres at

I assume that the above is bar (Kgf/cm2)?

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Was told that higher pressure reduces wear, less heat generated

That's kind of correct and I see your logic, but there are a few side issues with running pressures more than a few psi over recommendations. Grip is the main loser - you’ll be significantly reducing the contact patch. The tyre will tend to only wear on its centre line and any heat generated will not disperse through the whole tyre causing a differential between the edge and the centre. Apart from being dangerous, rolling from a warm/grippy centre to a cold edge in cornering, the temperature differential can cause the tyre to deform and/or crack over time. Generally a tyre at higher pressure will run cooler and may never reach its normal safe operating temperature. Comfort will suffer too.

Each tyre manufacturer is different. Each tyre model is different. A tyre design that runs cooler needs to run a lower pressure to get up to optimum temperature and vice-versa for those designed to run hotter, which is why tyre manufacturers offer their own recommended pressures for a given application that often differ from the bike manufacturers' recommendations. The tyre pressures in the XTZ handbook only really apply to Sirac/Tourance tyres – Yamaha never tested any others when coming up with the numbers.

I was always taught that the best technique establish how hot your tyres are actually running and how to get the right pressure balance between grip and wear is to use the 10/20% rule.

First you need to measure your tyre pressure cold (as you normally would). Then take a decent ride on a familiar piece of road that is mixed terrain (straights, corners, fast/slow sections) with your bike setup/loaded as you would normally use it. Then pull up, measure the tyre pressure immediately after stopping. If the pressure has risen by less than 10% on the front or 20% on the rear (rears run hotter than fronts, which is one of the reasons rears tyres generally carry higher recommend pressures), you should remove some air and reduce pressure. For example, starting with a front tyre at 30 psi (2.1 bar) should bring you up to 33 psi (2.3 bar) hot (+10%). If it goes above 33 psi, your tyre is probably under inflated for you, the bike, the tyres, road conditions, ambient temperature etc. If it doesn’t reach 33 psi, then the pressure is probably too high. Through experimentation, repeating the same route, once the pressure increase is established for a given rider, bike, tyre, load, road and temperature combination, you can check the tyre pressure again when it’s cooled down and make a note of it for future reference/cold pressure checks.

Obviously you need to do this in the conditions you ride and thus, the pressures you establish will only be good for you, your tyre brand and your bike. You can also repeat the process at different ambient temperatures so you get a set of cold measured pressures that suit spring, summer, autumn and winter riding.

Just an idea you might want to try (or not). If nothing else, it’s quite interesting to see what you’re tyres are doing in terms of temperature pressure. You could of course buy yourself an expensive tyre monitoring system, but that would be too easy!

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Same tyres, same pressure.