Inexspensive Tire Mod

[*Unimoger*]

So for quite a bit better grip, I took some ideas from a few other people to modify my wheels as inexspensivly as I could. As we all know the tires are glued onto the wheels with something that im pretty sure Nasa invented. An easy way around this (without damaging your tire) is to remove your whole wheel and tire from the car and wrap it in tinfoil.
Step 1: Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and place the wrapped tires on a cookie sheet. Set in oven for a minimum of 25 minutes. The longer theyre in there, the easier they are to remove from the wheel. Dont worry, they will not melt.
Step 2: Using gloves (due to heat) remove the tire from the oven and take it outside, or into a garage. Because it will smell like hot rubber, and your mom or wife wont appriciate it. Squeeze the two beads together and the should seperate from the rim fairly easy. If not, rewrap and put back in the oven for longer.
Step 3: Remove the inner foam from the tire and let cool. Trace the foam onto a piece of paper and cut it out. I used a star pattern. No mathmatics, just freehanded it.
Then trace it onto the foam. I used a black sharpie
Now draw a two lines, parallel to the edge of the foam
Step 4: Using a sharp pair of scissors cut straight through the foam and remove the little triangles. Leaving you with this
Step 5: At a slight angle cut the foam from your parallel line towards the center of the wheel. Do that all the way around on both sides and you should end up with this.


Step 6: Now before you reinstall the foam, (due to the lack of weight in the front of the Ridgecrest) add some weight to the wheels. You can find sticky weights for balancing auto wheels at almost any auto parts store. This is where I had to spend some money. A package containing 8oz of weights was about $5. I put 3oz on each front wheel. You can play with this a little to figure out what will work best for you. Make sure you put the weights opposite to eachother. To try to keep your wheel balanced for higher speeds.


Step 7: After you put everythig back together, since these are not beadlock wheels they do need to be reglued. I didnt have any of the special Nasa glue, so I just put about five drops of super glue on each bead. Both inside and outside.
Recap: So for about $5 and an hour worth of work, you can make a great improvement on your Ridgecrest crawler.

[doc.hamilton]

Nice mod, thanks for puttin this up!

Cheers,
T

[trevinator]

Those stock foams are going to be far too soft now that they are star cut. I did this when I first got my Ridgecrest......they just bind up, roll over on themselves, and work worse.

The wieght adding is teh best thing you could do but leave the foams alone or buy new good foams to star cut.

[scorpion_ax]

just thought i would through my 2 cents in here for the cutting. Go to a wallmart and get yourself a 10$ electric kitchen knife this make the cutting waaaaay better it will cut nice striaght lines and does it seemlessly like a hot knife through butter......

[trevinator]

I used the wifes "good Fiskar's" and they cut great! ........boy was that a mistake................don't do this boys, it doesn't end well.