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Date:         Fri, 8 Sep 2000 12:58:13 EDT
Reply-To:     FrankGRUN@AOL.COM
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From:         Frank Grunthaner <FrankGRUN@AOL.COM>
Subject:      Re: Friday musings to get you thinking (some Vanagon content)
Comments: To: macmillan@home.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

It is hard to understand how it is possible that the supporting QA lab at Firestone doesn't have delamination and interface bonding profiles on all of its products. If they really maintain that they don't have a clue, people need to run not walk away from these products. The Bridgestone group in Japan has a major QA and R&D investment and I expect that tires made in Japan would not be suspect. Too often multinationals are joined at the top and financially, but operate as completely independent entities at the bottom.

But the other question in my mind is the instability in the Explorer platform. Propensity to rollover is a well known phenomena with high CG machines. It is readily corrected by suspension geometry or track width changes. A solution such as a 4 psi change in tire pressure would seem totally inadequate to me.

This brings up a related Vanagon topic. The tire pressures front and rear and particularly the front to rear bias critically effect handling. As larger tires (eg. the 27-8.50x14) are mounted for better wear, handling etc, the factory numbers are no longer correct. The proper way to determine tire pressures and recommendations would be to do a pyrometer scan across the tire tread to measure the thermal profile after a series of road runs. These road runs should include some twisty-turnies, but do not have to be very well controlled. The point is that all the loading parameters that effect proper inflation including load, tread adhesion, tracking geometry etc. are resolved in the tread surface temperature. For some time I have been planning such a test. I have access to differential scanning pyrometers, but have only one point (ie. one '82 Westphalia, heavily loaded with 27-8.50x14 BFG's). Perhaps we could organize a local SoCal group with different Vanagons for a morning or evening of tire tests. Perhaps others on the list have access to similar equipment? Another possibility is the use of liquid crystal thermal strips. Once we know the actual temperature range, we could purchase a set of these for others to profile/tune their machines, even developing a data base.

Oh well, back to Mars.

Frank Grunthaner


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