Unmarked mystery tires master mud

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Published: August 2, 2007

FOREMAN, North Dakota – Take a walk around Josh Hanson’s STX480 and try to figure out what tires he’s running. It’s not easy because none of the eight big radials have any brand identification, size or specifications on the sidewalls. Just flat black rubber.

On Hanson’s farm in the southeastern corner of North Dakota, where record rainfall has been the rule for the past five years, farming in the mud has become the norm.

To cope with the conditions, Josh and his brother, Arlen, have a Case Quadtrac and the STX480.

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Josh is the primary operator on the STX480. He said the mystery dual radials perform quite differently from the brand name triple radials or the duals they had on other tractors before.

“The other tires would spin so bad, they’d dig you right down to the clay. That’s no good for your field,” Josh said. “These tires won’t spin like that. They hunker down and pull.”

He said the triples had slippage of about six percent. The Quadtrac runs zero to two percent slippage and the 480 with the new duals runs two to three percent slippage.

“But with those triples we had before, the sidewalls finally failed. And we got a lot of bounce with triples. These new tires don’t bounce much at all.”

The mystery tires are prototype Uniflex Axiobib radials. They are eight of only a handful of prototype tires Michelin put out for on-farm testing in North America last year.

The Hansons’eight tires had about 1,000 hours of seeding on them in South Dakota in spring 2006.

The Hansons got them later in the summer, in time for their fall fieldwork. They put another 800 hours on the tires pulling a chisel plow putting down anhydrous and dry fertilizer.

Arlen Hanson said he and Josh were at a field demonstration and Michelin was looking for someone to try the Axiobib tires.

“We had triples before and we didn’t like the bounce. We wanted something better. We decided to give it a try,” said Arlen.

“These duals don’t have the power hop of triples and they’re much better at avoiding soil compaction. The guys are driving them through low spots without any trouble. They have a lot of traction and they get into and out of even the low spots just like the track tractors.”

Josh doesn’t agree. He thinks they are better than tracks.

“With the duals, I’d say it floats as well as our Quad, but it goes through the mud better than the Quad.

“The Quadtrac almost has too much flotation. It stays up on the surface and spins the tracks. It doesn’t get enough traction to pull itself forward. This tractor with these new duals starts grabbing and digging and keeps you pulling forward.

“Under load, they keep the whole face of the tire on the ground.”

Josh said if you start out cold from the yard, the tires will hop around a little until they warm up, but then the road handling is good.

Josh said the Michelin men brought them the tires already mounted on rims and ready for ballasting. Although the tires can run fluid, they recommend wheel weights instead. Michelin engineers from North America and France have been out to inspect the tires several times.

You can notice a number of cracks in the sidewalls but Michelin engineer Kevin Lutz said, “the cracks you are seeing are actually folds in the sidewall rubber that occurred during the moulding process. This is a cosmetic problem and will not affect the life of the tire. We won’t have them on the production tires.”

About the author

Ron Lyseng

Ron Lyseng

Western Producer

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