Looking into loading my tires on one of my sky trak 6036s. I think foam filling is our best option but am concerned that doing this will hurt me in the sand and clay mud. Does any one have any experience with this or advise? Thanks in advance!
All our machines use foam filled tires. No issues with loss of traction. Its does add alot of weight. Pros and cons to that. It helps with stability and added saftey in my opinion. The down side is that alot of our customers pull 6ks around with a gooseneck or have a towing company move them with a medium duty roll back. Depending on your set up the added wieght might put you over the axle wieght. Plus if you dont have a company im your area that can remove the tire and foam or swap you out a rim a tire alrwady filled combo it can be a pain dealing with side of it when its time to replace. But honestly i think foam filled is the only way go. It don't many tire service calls plus down time to add up to the cost of a foam filled tire.
I couldn't agree more with service calls and downtime adding up, especially when you have multiple machines in different counties like we normally do. Thanks!
Source and price your foam filling and then check with Mitchell Industrial Tire, Chattanooga, TN. Their offering is solid tires, not filled. My experience was in forklift applications for many years as an independent forklift repair shop. In forklifts (cushion and pneumatic), the applications/usage (capacity loads) tended to bulge out the filled tire to a point it began to wear thin and eventually wear thru and fail. Sorta like having a heavy "boot" in an older tire to use it on out, and it failing at the boot area due to out of roundness. Over the years, we settled on installing solids vs filled, as the wear life was much better. Converse is, a damaged/chunked out/cut solid is a larger loss than a filled. A lot depends on how you load it, who operates it, and where you actually run it. I am sure that the filling and material used has improved over the time of my experience, and filled may be nearly equal. Just an opinion, no cost, maybe no value.