I have a recently purchased 2004 snorkel tb60 manlift 22000 lb 4 wheel Drive with 4000 hours on it. Two of the four originally Factory foam filled tires look like an air filled tire that is halfway inflated. So I'm wondering if the foam can deteriorate inside, and if so is there a way to add more foam or possibly just inject water to fatten the tires up again?
Anyone?
Is it possible the tires were changed and aren't foam filled? Is there valve stems on the rims?
Yes, the foam can crush down on the inside and make a tire look like it's going flat. We had foam filled tires on several stacking conveyors years ago. The weight eventually crushed them. The foam filling is not always a good idea. I do not know about filling them more. We had to trash ours as they flattened. It was an expensive learning process.
Whatever you do to remedy your problem, be check the specs of the machine, if the specs require foam filled tires it's typically because the manufacturer of the machine calculates the weight of the foam filled tires as additional counterweight ballast for aerial lift machines. If they require foam filled and you instead replace them with pneumatic tires then you would be taking away counterweight of the lift.
Thanks for this great information everyone! The valve stems were full of goo, and I was unable to remove the center pin. But I think I now may know one reason why these tires look more flat. I had the machine parked parallel on the side of about a 15 degree incline Hillside and when I looked at the other two tires on the uphill side, the side wall was almost completely flattened out next to the ground , so I'm thinking that the foam filling was allowing the machine to sag to the downhill side thus making the uphill side of the side walls look under-inflated. So I moved the machine to a perfectly flat area, and now the side walls are not sagging as much. About crushing the foam in the tires, if I am going to park the machine for a long time like several months without using it, would it be recommended to move the machine a little bit every so often in order to rotate the pressure on the foam, and if so, how often?