how many dips of acid did it take to see this?

 

 

BEST THREAD OF 04 - imo. Thanks to all! (I think if duallies had any kind of real performance value Jim Hall would have tried em 40 years ago.)

 

GREAT TOPIC, YEAH!!!!
Nice Pink Thunderbird???


An interesting thing about tires is, for a given tire pressure, doubling
the tire width will not actually double the tire "patch" touching the ground.
If you car weighs 4000 pounds, thats 1000pounds per tire, for 33psi tire
pressure, there will be 30 square inches of tire touching the ground. If
you double the width of the patch, the length will just be halved.

Not to say that wider tire widths dont have advantages, just saying that they
do not add to the actual contact patch. Kinda interesting.

 

I've heard that mentioned before. I'm still a little fuzzy on the physics of it, could you explain a little more. The theory is that there needs to be a certain amount of contact to support the car, and any tire with the same psi will need that same amount of contact? What if the pressure rating differ from a wider tire? Then I would potentially have a larger contact patch, right?

 

Higher pressure, smaller contact patch.

 

Yeah, and intuitively, you recognize that a tire is low on pressure when you can see it deformed too much. For every force, there is an equal and opposite force. The air in the tires is what is holding the car up.