ATV Tech: The Art Of Flat Tire Avoidance
There’s no getting around one simple fact of off-road life: flat tires suck! Whether engaged in a race, out for a leisurely cruise or using your machine for work, nobody is immune to that sinking feeling that comes with looking down and seeing your tire’s sidewall folded under the weight of the rim.
Fortunately these are days where preventative measures mean we no longer have to wait to hear the hissing of escaping air to take action. In fact, we’ve compiled a list of some of the options and tips we’ve had success with throughout the years in keeping the air in the atmosphere and the air inside our tire’s carcass from ever becoming one.
1) Check Your Pressure Regularly
Sounds obvious, right? Well the leading cause for trail-going pinch flats is running too little air in the tire. Further making this one tricky is the fact that as ATV tires get softer than the recommended PSI, they may even gain valuable traction on the process. The downside of course is all it takes is flat landing or good smack into a rock or root to pull an under-inflated tire’s bead clean of the rim. This is one of those lessons you never want to learn miles from civilization.
2) Flat Tire Defender
Believe it or not, there a few companies out there like Tire Technology LLC out of Arizona who manufacture and sell foam inserts designed to assist in carrying the vehicle load on a blown tire until you can get to a place to fix the flat. While they don’t completely eliminate the need for air altogether, but they do allow for less pressure and offer priceless sidewall insurance should you get a flat and have to limp on back to camp, the pits or the nearest auto garage for air.
3) Tubes
While our ATV rims are designed to run tubeless tires like a car, we can take a valuable hint from our motorcycling and bicycling cousins by running tubes as an added measure of protection against punctures that may tear the carcass alone, pinch flats and especially at eliminating slow leaks.
4) TireBalls
Similar to the foam inserts like the Flat Tire Defender, TireBalls operate on the same principle but are designed as multiple-celled inserts that can in fact be run-flat (no air needed). Each individual cell is made from state of the art materials that are a claimed 10-times more puncture resistant than conventional heavy-duty neoprene tubes. And even if one, two, or even three TireBalls suffer punctures, the rest of the Balls pick up the slack and keep deflation from taking place.
5) Slime
There are two ways of approaching the Slime factor and either is pretty effective in our opinion. The first is applying a coating of the green stuff directly into your tire in the garage before inflating it to seal and coat, acting as an added layer of sealant/ flat preventative. (Along this same line of reasoning many shops actually sell inner-tubes pretreated with a coating of Slime for this very purpose). The other is to carry a bottle of the stuff with you in the event that you begin loosing air on the trail. The downside to this however, is that unlike sealant/ propellant in a can (like Fix-a-Flat for example), Slime does not reinflate an already flat tire. If you go this route, not a bad idea to consider bringing along a battery-powered compressor or a bicycle pump.