Source : Driven Media/ YouTube
A duo on a YouTube channel built airless tires from scratch using small plastic rolls bought from hardware store, and then even tested them on a car.
Puncture proof airless tires are the next big thing when it comes to tires and the major tire manufacturers have spent years designing, manufacturing & testing them. We have yet to see them in routine use, but field testing have also begun.
Unwilling to wait for an official release, the duo on Driven Media’s YouTube channel made a DIY version of the tires for themselves.
Airless tires
Tire making is a complex engineering task, so it’s obvious the duo haven’t actually built a new tire. Instead, they used what was available to them. So what you see in the video above is the sum total of the steel wheels from a Ford, plastic fresh water pipes, a tread from a regular tire & lots of nuts & bolts to-hold all of-this in place.
Pieces of plastic pipe occupy the area between the old wheel & the tire’s outer tread to create an airless tire. A nifty piece of engineering in all of this is the placement of smaller pipes along-side bigger ones, which the duo say give these tires anti-vibration properties.
The real challenge is to test the tires on a actual car real world conditions over a long-period of time, but the two opted for something less demanding by trialing it-out on a race track at first. Since the tire borrows the outer tread & inner wheel from commercially available goods, it manages to hold good during trails, except for a few nuts & bolts that keep coming apart.
Puncture test
Mandatory for an airless tire is how it takes a bed of nails, and the duo even tried that in trial. The tires came-out of the test fairly unhurt and then went through a number of other tests such as driving on grass, bumpy rocky roads and even massive potholes.
Overall the tires performed well in testing, and although they carry the risk of breaking with prolonged use, this is the best you can get on a modest budget and when building out-of a garage.
If you’re really interested in airless tires, you’ll have to wait a little longer, as Michelin will be implementing them on Chevrolet’s next-generation electric vehicles.
If you can’t wait, now you know how to put them in a garage.
