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FogHelmut posted:265/70R17 or 255/75R17 ? Bird's eye view here from northeastern BC as I've never been to California in my life. (Maybe next year, eh...) - AIUI a taller tire will give you a bit more fore/aft contact area so I doubt there's anything meaningful in it in that respect (or that you'd notice anyway even if there is, at that small a difference in sizing). I was making the same decision a few weeks ago (Colo ZR2) and went with 265/70/17 as much for perceived greater ease of getting rid of them as part worns later on as anything, I suppose. - If you're going to be far from home very often IMO ease of replacement > anything else - offroadey problems can usually be resolved either by pre-applying brain rather than slamming your face into them or, absent that, some shovelling, whereas nothing's going to make the truck shipping your one weird replacement tire from Guadalajara go any faster vs some backwoods place just having one sitting around. - There's I think three, possibly four? different tires Cooper sells as the AT3 - if you're looking at the 'regular' one note you're comparing an LT tire to a P tire (on those BFGs) which, yes, will be a bit heavier and rougher, but will tend to stand up to abuse better. I think you can get a load C on the AT3s in LT265/70/17 which is what I'd probably do given those choices. - Anecdotal of course (and a bit of an extreme environment) but I work at an alpine mine, meaning minimum 50km of lovely gravel-at-best roads per vehicle per day, and the one vehicle I can remember us having on site in the last year with P rating tires, a contractor's brand new rental F150, blew all four of them out inside ten days just driving to work and back. LTs on F250s in the same environment, even at slightly higher pressures, it's usually more like 1-3 per year (and that's the Goodyear Duratracs which are supposedly ever so easy to kill). - I would not, personally, touch the BFGs with a ten-foot pole, but even my highway driving is in the middle of Goddamn nowhere and better odds on punctures is worth a bit rougher ride especially when the weather gets hostile (hello from May 9th, 10cm of snow so far today). Non-LT tires on pickups of any size basically don't exist up here for that reason, noone wants to be out faffing around changing wheels at -40. Maybe it'd be better at +40 but I have my doubts. YMMV on that though - looking at them I'd say BFGs no doubt nicer on highway and better on ice/plowed snowy pavement, somewhere between worse and much worse everywhere else. - If using a wider/more aggro tire I sure hope you have mudflaps. I'm otherwise very much sold on the ZR2 but the one criminal thing is having to jump through aftermarket hoops to get ones that fit even slightly upsized tires - this wasn't even too bad a road for up here and I had to hose off the roof, I dread to think how the paint'd end up in a 'rocks' rather than ' canuckistani bog' environment, heh: 
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May 10, 2022 05:18
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FogHelmut posted:I'm in a Colorado Z71 with 2" lift from Bilstein 6112/5160 + add a leaf. 265/70/17 should fit with no issue. If you're cutting up tires at that sort of mileage then I'd say definitely LTs on the menu for you heh. Yes to both on damage (though more the former - gravel roads refreshed with whatever mine waste someone felt like running through a crusher for a couple of minutes - than the latter, nobody's going rock crawling up here and actually going off road, in the sense of leaving the road entirely, is often asking to give your local crane contractor some money to extract you - more just getting bashed about by potholes or frozen ruts or dried out ruts or stuff poking out of ruts or etc...the thaw season makes a mess but is a bit more comfortable  ). The other part of the problem here is that winter runs from about October to now-ish so the preference is for softer tires with lots of siping which is the opposite of what you want for sharp gravel at least from a wear POV.Tires on the one above are Cooper STT Pros which I can't see making much sense in the desert, by my understanding you basically want the least aggressive tire you can get away with for that sort of environment as throwing a bunch of dirt around is counterproductive. Great as backwoods tow truck dodger tires however (just, no ice please). In a vacuum, I gather the gold standard gravel bombers are the Toyo M55 (indestructible - we have a set on one of the mine trucks which have done over 5000km on exposed steel belts, all on the mine, and STILL show no sign of dying - just heavy as all hell and only load E, basically standard fit for anything forestry up here) > Toyo CT (same but less popular for whatever reason) > Cooper ST Max (bit better ride, still tough, but allegedly the tread design means you WILL have an incorrigible pull to one side on pavement) > your pick of Cooper/BFG/Toyo/Falken ATs >< Michelin LTX (which seem to be a common 'way better than you'd expect' pick). I think Cooper were/are very big in Australia so a lot of their tires are basically designed to work over there first and foremost & will be decent in your neck of the woods as a result. (Practically speaking though it's probably 75% GY Duratracs up here though, mostly because you can juuuust get away with running them year round as they're soft enough to not completely go to poo poo when it gets extremely cold) You'll be ok for size for sure I'd say, I think the ZR2 factory is basically the same dimensions as you've got yourself now and the 265/70 is a no issues fit with room to spare, & I ended up ordering the same mudflaps (stupid name...) three weeks ago as they're less obstructive than the other options, sounds like they might turn up this week if I'm lucky.
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May 10, 2022 07:00
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IOwnCalculus posted:I'm not following that, the STT Pros are extremely popular here in AZ and there is no shortage of dust and dirt to kick up on the trails. I'm running the Evolution M/T mostly because it's much cheaper than the STT Pro, but it's aggressive/loud enough that I wouldn't run it on something that's actually doing commute duty as well. Hey, I don't know, the nearest desert to where I am is like 12 hours drive away ( and in the Yukon )I was under the impression though that while MTs were popular for rock crawling they were more liable to very efficiently excavate a hole straight down in soft sand vs your AT or etc type tire. I find the STTs not too bad, to be honest. Really loud between about 50-70kph but then it seems to drop off quite sharply to the point of being easy to ignore. Whether that'll still be the case a few months down the line is the real question I suppose. Would be infuriating if I was doing much driving in town but hey, finally an upside to being in the back o'beyond...
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May 11, 2022 02:12
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FogHelmut posted:The lightest LT E load tire seems to be the Firestone Destination XT at 45 lbs for 265/70/17, but it doesn't test well in performance ratings. User reviews put it much higher though. But also I don't like Firestone's font and it wont look nice with the white letters. Your safety margin isn't in payload (which is mostly irrelevant on a midsize pickup - you're not putting 10,000lbs on those four wheels!) but tire durability/off-road performance - more rubber, more tread depth, stronger sidewalls, less siping (so less rock chipping) etc. That's not an E vs D vs C vs P or whatever load thing, generally, just an LT vs not, thing. (iirc LT payload ratings are also understated by about 10%, by design since some 'extra' abuse expectation is built in) The load range isn't really about payload per se. Or, it is, sort of, but as much as anything it's a shorthand for max inflation pressure. Your E load tires will be built up so they can hold 80psi or so. C is I think 50? I don't know offhand if it varies a bit per manufacturer or whether it's a very standardised thing. Your payload rating is at max pressure for a given tire - so an E tire rated for 3000lbs is rated for that at 80psi, because it's not really about strength there but rather heat buildup/dissipation. Usually the payload rating at an equivalent pressure will be lower on an LT tire I think, yeah, because there's more Stuff there and they'll heat up a bit more. You are not, obviously, going to want to run 80psi on a Colorado, at least if you want your teeth to stay in your head. Or even 50 - probably about 32-35. Basically whatever pressure matches the equivalent payload point of the OEM tires is usually a good place to start (the technically ideal way to figure it being to grab a piece of chalk, mark the tires and just...look at the pattern they leave on the ground). This is a part of why LT tires are by reputation so much harsher - people just look at the max inflation pressure and go 'oh, ok, I have to put that much air in then'. They definitely will be harsher, for sure, but for a similar tire (like the AT3 LT vs AT3 4S) at proper pressure shouldn't be all that much worse. Running E load will be a bit harsher than C load, though, for no real benefit (as you'll never use the higher pressure and they're not generally meaningfully more robust afaik).
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May 12, 2022 03:22
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 A lot of this stuff is a bit counterintuitive, some of it varies by tire model/producer in ways that may never be known by anyone but the engineers, and there's legions of idiotic windbags on the internet who will happily say a bunch of absolute nonsense to anyone who'll liste...oh dear. I mean, there's things you look at that are superficially odd. The LT tire has more tread depth, so there's more rubber there, so it'll last longer! Except, if you look at an LT and non, both with a warranty, the non will be warrantied to last longer. IE...there's more material...and also it'll wear quicker. Sounds nuts, but then you think, the composition of the material won't be the same - maybe you have harder or softer rubber, more or less silica, more or less other junk in there, maybe the design is subtly different, maybe it's just about the use the designers expected each to get, maybe reinforcement in other places is putting extra pressure on the tread, maybe...you get the point, it's just a rabbit hole.
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May 12, 2022 06:04
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It is the ~ 2-3 months of the year here when everything is relatively dry so this did not involve getting that dirty, relatively speaking.     
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Aug 15, 2022 05:11
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ryanrs posted:Yeah, that's what I thought. But gentle inputs got me stuck, and full throttle with tons of wheel spin got me to the top. If you have clearance issues and don't want to use chains I'd at least look at getting a set of the fabric snow sock type things, they're not as good and somewhat fragile but do work and shouldn't do any damage (to your van, anyway) if rubbing. They would probably not have helped you much here though as they're not really meant to get wet. On the broader point, there isn't really a one-size-fits-all 'here's how to attack snow obstacles' because it depends very much on the type and depth of snow, what's going on underneath it and what temperature it is and has been, and obviously things can change from one hour to the next if you have freezing/melting going on. I can skate on top of 5ft of snow on a cold, dark afternoon, sink in it up to my waist in the same place the next day (warm, sunny), then walk on it like pavement again the next morning after it's been -10 all night and everything's frozen up. Same principles apply to driving... Being gentle is for when you want to stay on top of snow for whatever reason. If the road underneath is sheet ice rather than gravel then if you dig a hole you may have less grip, not more, unless using studs. It can work, generally works better when it's colder & with actual winter tires (basically, more siping > less) because what you're doing is using snow (packed into or on the tire) to grip snow (on the ground) - interlocking crystal structures and all that. Falls apart if it's warm enough that stuff is melting, can be made possible or impossible by a bunch of micro-scale things you'd never really think about (you just got off a 3hr highway drive and your tires are warm? not doing that straight away as you'll melt your 'road', that kind of thing). In your case here it seemed, watching the video, that there wasn't really much depth of snow, what was there was pretty much all on the verge of melting, and you were probably digging through it to get at the gravel underneath, at least in places, which was wet but mostly not overly icy? When you pull backwards it seems like there's some pretty dirty water running off. In that situation you probably did the 'right' thing, from the narrow POV of getting to where you got to. I hope you walked or otherwise knew that climb before flooring it as there could have been stuff under there (terrain, deeper snow etc) that could have had you heading off the road entirely if you hit it at speed and weren't expecting it.
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Nov 30, 2022 03:24
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hello I work at an remote alpine mine in northern British Columbia. It probably doesn't snow as much here in extremis as down there, it's inland. Can still do 50cm+ a day in a decent storm, drifts can be two or four or six times that in the space of an afternoon if you get wind blowing stuff off a dump wall or something. You should consider: - Do Not park for a long period of time in a snowstorm in a location that you do not know, with absolute certainty, will be plowed. Not 50m away from the parking lot that you think might be easy to get recovered from, not half a mile down the road, not at a site that might just be written off for a month because one of the trucks hit the ditch and some foreman waved everyone off it, not "oh they usually do this one it'll be fine", you're in the parking lot where you know that at 6am the next day the plow truck guy will be sitting on the horn and yelling at you to move your piece of poo poo van. Particularly, don't park anywhere that you don't understand well enough to say with certainty that you know where wind will be coming from, how local vegetation is going to affect it, how snow will move around the immediate vicinity etc. I can take a walk in places at work and go from bare ground to a 3m deep drift to 5cm of snowpack so hard you could run a train on it back to a 3m deep drift back to bare ground in the space of, like, 50m horizontally. Moving snow, I cannot emphasize this enough, sucks poo poo and depending on the circumstances (particularly, drifting & wind direction) it can be literally impossible to move snow as fast as necessary to recover or remobilize a vehicle without, like, a bulldozer, even granting that you have the stamina to work at it for potentially hours upon hours upon hours at a time. Trying to make yourself a road can be an absolute exercise in futility, you can at best rely on being able to get yourself out/off of one a drift and onto otherwise open ground using human power alone. I have been in situations where I've made it 29m through a 30m snowdrift, beached the frame, and had to spend two hours digging to move that one additional meter because it's not a quick job when you have to retreat into the cab for 20 minutes to give yourself 5 minutes warm enough to work. Highway pullout on the road to a ski resort that's going to do its own road maintenance? Sure, why not. Ski bums have been doing that for decades. Anything more complex than that and you're rolling the dice on having a reeeeeal bad time. - Do Not rely on any kind of commercial recovery service to remove your vehicle from a situation like that. They might. Depending on where you it may even be likely! But, also, they might say, hey, you're a loving idiot for going out there and we're not going to get your piece of poo poo van because it'd take us 12 hours just to get to you right now and we have a 72-hour long waiting list as it is, rear end in a top hat *click* The actual way you get recovered from those circumstances, at least here in BC, is that you find an obscure facebook page called '[area] j33p krew' or something along those lines, you make a 'help im trap' post (probably the next morning, after you yourself have been recovered to somewhere with an actual phone signal), then at some point in the next one to several days one to several people show up to do something on a continuum between shaking their heads and telling you you're hosed to spending one to several hours of multiple peoples' time extricating you. It's all fun and games until your beautiful first-time wilderness snowshoe adventure to look at the winter wonderland dumps you face-first into a tree well you couldn't see and you break something, and now, whoops, it's a week before you're going to see another person! Good luck! In closing, for your snow adventure desires I suggest one of these instead 
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Jan 17, 2023 07:27
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ryanrs posted:Thanks for the specific warning re. drifts, that makes sense. And if I'm 100 ft from the parking lot, there's also the likelihood that the plowman will dump all his snow between me and the parking lot, which would be bad. I had to do some road clearance today to be able to leave work so in order to take my mind off the scratty little toolcat making its usual worrying noises I thought it'd be interesting to try and illustrate the problem. This is a bare road across a hillside. It's fairly windy today, but not very windy, above freezing (unusual ~ Oct-Mar), last snowfall (dusting) was three days ago, last really significant significant snowfall was at least a couple of weeks ago, total snowfall for the season has been light so far. So, this is almost a best case scenario (extreme cold is usually better, in that there tends to be very little wind and the snow stays lighter for longer)  This is a 24hr drift a bit further down. As in, this road was completely cleared 24 hours ago. This is reasonably soft powdery snow, not too difficult to move.  A bit further down the road, that's not so bad...  Ah! Well. Nevertheless, See how the stuff coming out of the blower is more of a jet than a c loud, now, even though the wind's a lot stronger here.  Hey, I was just in here 10 minutes ago...  At the edge of the road this one is about level with my head sitting here, a little lower than I would be in a pickup. This is not nice soft powdery snow, it's more like wet sand. It builds up like a dune and migrates like a dune once it's built up. Hitting this with the blower at about 10km/h gives you maybe half a meter of forward movement before you stop. Or, you can creep forward slowly eating away at about 1/20th of the width of the blower at most. If you'd parked here, or needed to get through this thing, you'd be digging all day.  Two hours later when I left for home getting through that drift (that is, over the previously-cleared-by-me part of the road) was just about possible, with a decent runup. If I hadn't been in there earlier I wouldn't have tried, because it's hard to judge how deep or cohesive the snow is and if you don't make it through, good news - you get to dig yourself out while standing inside an ice scouring machine. Obviously this is a bit extreme in some ways - tree cover helps a lot with this and you're not going to find many rock dumps in snowmobile parking lots. At the same time...don't assume that a road that's open this morning will still be open this evening, even if it hasn't snowed recently, don't expect snow to behave similarly from one area to the next, and don't park downwind of bare slopes.
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Jan 21, 2023 04:36
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 05:16 |
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FogHelmut posted:I'm not in the market for tires, but I'm reading in various places that some people love Michelin Defender LTX for off road in everything but mud? I thought they were a CUV highway tire? My wife's Ford Edge came with them standard, and they've been great in all weather road use, but never took that off road. I don't think there's any AT that does well in mud, but I think my biggest concern would be durability on rocks taking chunks out and stuff like that. n.b It's easy to miss the distinction between the LTX AT (which is borderline a truck 'highway' tire) and the LTX M/S (which like you say is more or less a regular car all-season tire turned up to 11, a generic low-end AT tire and a generic low-end winter tire stuck in a blender, tons of siping, presumably this is what you'd get on an Edge) We have the former on a couple of the mine trucks due to them being standard on a lot of new HD pickups - I found them to be downright dangerous on ice (talking half as much again to twice the stopping distance vs even more 'standard' ATs), a very poor snow tire and a very poor mud tire, but particularly quiet and tolerant of dry dirt roads with a lot less visible wear after a summer than we'd usually see. For somewhere that doesn't get too much water falling from the sky (you're in Cali, right?) and assuming you don't go looking for trouble, they're probably a lot more in tune with the actual, rather than perceived, needs of people buying AT tires than most options. Expensive things to buy, though, at least for Canada. The M/S AFAIK they've been making almost unchanged for at least 30 years - I'm pretty sure I remember seeing new LR Discoveries etc rolling around on essentially the same thing in the mid 90s. Peak "don't fix what isn't broken" for tires, really, they make a winter version which is visually completely identical so that tells you something. Just a different compound in that case, I'd assume. Yeah you wouldn't want to go crawling around any rock gardens, but I can't imagine they'd be in any way a problem for just rolling up to a campsite or the odd fire road or whatever Joe McNormal spends $2000 on the latest and greatest ~offroad~ gear to do. People overanalyze these things a lot of the time. If you want an AT that can do mud, the GY Duratrac (though, again kinda borderline on being an AT tire, just to the other extreme) is still probably the best at that, they're probably on about 60-70% of anything 4wd that leaves pavement up here for being about the only thing both widely available and actually good at all three weather states (forest fire, hoth, and the 4-8 week Russian-style mud season between them), usually you just get to pick two at most with most of the 'modern' ATs (Falken, Toyo, BFG, General etc) being fine in the summer, a bit worse on ice, maybe a bit better in small amounts of snow, a bit worse for deeper/wetter snow, somewhere between notably worse and really bad for seriously muddy stuff, but quieter and better suited to something you're actually just going to drive to work most of the time. Where the Duratrac falls over is they're a soft rubber (so chip easily, which matters in warmer/drier places; the fact that they don't harden up so much when it's seriously cold is hugely important up here where it can be -30c or even less for weeks at a time but completely irrelevant in a lot of the US) and don't like low pressures - you'll see a lot of complaining about sidewall strength. This matters if you're a 'seriously recreational' user who is putting the effort in to play with tire air pressures, and essentially not at all if you're e.g commercial/industrial (because noone has the time or inclination or tools to gently caress around with that, you just drive whatever the thing is and then get it fixed if it breaks), or if you just don't bother. We destroy probably 10 of them per year and wear out about 20-30 at work (across maybe 10 vehicles), at 40psi on everything since most of them go 35km back to town every day, and they last to the point of being mashed into a sort of sponge texture by the mine roads (which are either just mud or, if it's all been graded off, vaguely crushed waste rock) with almost all punctures being on really worn out old ones.
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Sep 30, 2023 06:38
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