----- Original Message -----
From: "ygmir" <ygmir@onemain.com>
To: "Military Vehicles Mailing List" <mil-veh@mil-veh.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 27, 2000 12:06 AM
Subject: Re: [MV] [MVlist] 9:00-20 tire chains
> Hi Rikk,
> As far as my knowledge goes, the only problem is heat. The extra flexing
> that takes place causes excess heat to build up at high speeds.
>
That's entirely as I understand it too.
>But, the
> tires are made to flex, so, it doesn't do appreciable structural damage as
> far as just flexing.
>
Looking at the shed carcasses on our motorways and your interstates I think
this is wrong.
Although the-side walls are intended to flex somewhat, serious
under-inflation has the excess heat owing to carcass friction concentrated
deep in the tyre side-wall, ultimately the whole area simply melts and the
layers detach leaving the wheel with some vestigial sidewall and the rest
flies off in a spectacular and dangerous manner. This seems to happen often
enough with correctly inflated truck tyres let alone those grossly
under-inflated.
Although I haven't heard of an incidence, the UK traffic police have a legal
spec to work to. Tyres have to be within 2 psi of the manufactures stated
pressure for the application, theoretically you can attract (licence) points
for each failure.
Richard
Southampton - England
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 02 2001 - 23:13:26 PST