Tire pressure for hauling wood

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granpajohn said:
ewdudley said:
We made another turn and almost rolled again. The Coupe de Ville is not your ideal machine for high speed cornering in residential neighborhoods. The handling is very mushy...unlike the Red Shark, which had responded very nicely to situations requiring the quick four-wheel drift. But the Whale -- instead of cutting loose at the critical moment -- had a tendency to dig in, which accounted for that sickening "here we go" sensation.

At first I thought it was only because the tires were soft, so I took it into the Texaco station next to the Flamingo and had the tires pumped up to fifty pounds each which alarmed the attendant, until I explained that these were "experimental” tires.

But fifty pounds each didn’t help the cornering, so I went back a few hours later and told him I wanted to try seventy five. He shook his head nervously. “Not me,” he said, handing me the air hose. “Here. They’re your tires. You do it.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “You think they can’t take seventy-five?” He nodded, moving away as I stooped to deal with the left front. “You’re damn right,” he said. “Those tires want twenty eight in the front and thirty two in the rear. Hell, fifty’s dangerous, but seventy five is crazy. They’ll explode!” I shook my head and kept filling the left front. “I told you,” I said, “Sandoz laboratories designed these tires. They’re special. I could load them up to a hundred.

“God almighty!” he groaned. “Don’t do that here.”

“Not today,” I replied. “I want to see how they corner with seventy-five.”

He chuckled. “You won’t even get to the corner, Mister.”

“We’ll see,” I said, moving around to the rear with the air-hose. In truth, I was nervous. The two front ones were tighter than snare drums; they felt like teak wood when I tapped on them with the rod. But what the hell? I thought. If they explode, so what? [...]

As it turned out, the Whale behaved very nicely with the altered tire pressures. The ride was a trifle rough; I could feel every pebble on the highway, like being on roller skates in a gravel pit ... but the thing began cornering in a very stylish manner, very much like driving a motorcycle at top speed in a hard rain: one slip and ZANG, over the high side, cartwheeling across the landscape with your head in your hands.

--H S Thompson

Thank you for that EW. I was reading this post thinking "what is this guy on about? How strange" Then about half way through I got the feeling I had read this style of writing before, and think "this is from one of those Fear and Loathing books - Hunter S. Thompson"; and Yes! it's true.
Thanks for the 1970 (+/-) nostalgia.
Note to young people: read it, he's funny and talented. And remember: When you're doing that many reds, you need all the vitamin C you can get.

This is actually the first bit of HST I've ever read in my life...never heard of him till he died and couldn't figure out why people were upset by it. I had alot of trouble just getting through this short bit and really didn't find it very entertaining at all. But fair enough, I'm going to locate a copy of one of his books and give it a fair shake. Any one book that anyone can recommend?
 
Not a truck, but for my car, I run the radials at 35-40 psi. Door sticker says 30. Check my math, but if I get 40000 miles on a set of tires, and if I get 29 mpg at lower inflation, that's 1379 gal of fuel. With the higher inflation I get 34 mpg on highway driving, which is 1176 gal of fuel, or 203 less gallons. At $3/gallon, that's $609. I figure that comes really close to paying for the tires.
 
mayhem said:
This is actually the first bit of HST I've ever read in my life...never heard of him till he died and couldn't figure out why people were upset by it. I had alot of trouble just getting through this short bit and really didn't find it very entertaining at all. But fair enough, I'm going to locate a copy of one of his books and give it a fair shake. Any one book that anyone can recommend?

For lack of better....I'll suggest Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I laughed out loud for the first 5 pages and then decided to finish the whole book. I agree that the little post here is not very entertaining.
There is a series of Fear and Loathing books that I should read, but I do not read much fiction these days. (Dave Barry and J.R.R. Tolkien the only exceptions.) Put another way: Comedy is good, drama is bad; (or at least boring).
(Am I off topic? Heck, yeah.)
 
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