[AT] Osage vs. Firestone

charlie hill charliehill at embarqmail.com
Thu Oct 30 06:04:51 PDT 2014


Dean,  I commented on foam in tires for construction equipment
but I don't think it would be a good idea for your tractor.  The first
reason being that it would make it very uncomfortable to drive on
the highway in road gear because the only suspension on a tractor
is the flex of the tires.  The second reason is traction.  Tractor tires
get part of their traction from flex in the sidewalls and I suspect
foaming them would be similar to putting 50 lbs of air pressure in
your truck tires and trying to drive it in sand.

Over the years I have bought most but not all of my pickup truck tires
from a local oil jobber who has a service shop.  I usually bought whatever
tire he had a deal on.  One year he was big on an off brand tire made by
Uniroyal but branded as Delta.  They had a premium tire that supposedly
would seal it's self if punctured.  I bought them because it was a deal and
never expected the puncture proof aspect to be important.  First because I
doubted it would work and second because I've never had much problem
with flats on my pickup trucks.    Well, I wore that set of tires out and
went back to buy more.  The guy pulled the old ones off and called me to 
come
and look at them.  Both rear tires were full of nails and roofing tacks.
I think total in both rear tires was a total of close to 30 nails all of 
which would
have caused a flat on a tire without that feature.  The nails were still in 
the
tires, worn off slick on the outside but sticking through inside.   I had 
been working
that year on a construction project that had several different companies on 
site
and  I suspect that is where I got in the nails.

I said all that to say that some of the run flat products DO work.

Charlie


-----Original Message----- 
From: Dean Vinson
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 10:40 PM
To: 'Antique tractor email discussion group'
Subject: Re: [AT] Osage vs. Firestone

Thanks for all the great comments, gentlemen.   For now I took the no-action
alternative, other than having the local tire place repair the two slow
leaks.  I'm likely done operating the tractor in thorn country for the year,
so am probably okay until next year anyway.  I'll study up on the things
people have been mentioning--slime, foam, Kevlar liners, steel wheels (okay,
probably not the steel wheels... :)

The tires are 6-ply Firestone Champion Guide Grip, brand new, so I'm not
going to be in the market for entirely new tires for (hopefully) many years.
I did at least discover that they're tubeless instead of tubed as I'd
originally posted.  I had it in my head that they had innertubes, I guess
because the rears do and I had to have a new tube put in one over the summer
(big sharp rusty nail or some such thing had found it).   But big as life
they say "Tubeless" on the sidewall, now that I stopped to take a look at
them.

Dean VP wrote:
> Is there no way to police around the trees manually somehow
> prior to tractor traffic?  Or is there just too many?

Yeah, too many, and the real problem is with the standing trees that I'm
mowing down with the rotary cutter.  Osage orange trees don't seem to have
thorns once they get big and old (unnecessary by then since the wood is
about as hard as iron, I guess), but the young ones are covered with the
@#*$! things and they're strong and wicked sharp.   I've cut down a lot of
the young trees and hauled them to a couple of big burn piles, but that's a
tedious and usually somewhat bloody task--they often grow in little clusters
with multiple trunks all close together and protected by those thorn-covered
branches, so there's no easy way to even get at them.  So for the smallest
ones, where each trunk in the cluster is maybe only an inch or so in
diameter, I run over them with the brushhog.  I steer the front wheels of
the tractor close to but not directly on top of them, but there's no way to
avoid hitting some.

Dean Vinson
Saint Paris, Ohio



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