Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. This is Overland Weekly, episode number 20. My name is Davey. I am your host for this episode, and I've got a couple of guests with me today. I have Mr. Andrew Decker and Mr. Nick Jaynes. Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for having us. Yeah, absolutely. Andrew is a lead applications engineer. Is that the correct title? Yeah. Is it Bridgestone, Firestone or Bridgestone Americas now? I want to make sure I get this right. Bridgestone Americas, and then Firestone and Bridgestone are brands. Got you. All right. Then nick is the founder of Differential Communications, which is an overland and off-road public relations firm who happens to have Firestone as a client. You guys are based in the Pacific Northwest, correct? That's right. Yes, sir. Awesome. So this came together by my friend, Aubrey Swinson, who some of you guys in this part of the country may know. Aubrey works for Firestone as his day job, and he's got 100 series that he wheels a lot of events around here. And Aubrey said, You really need to get somebody from some Firestone on. And Firestone introduced me to nick and nick to Andrew. And then nick said, Well, hey, if you're going to talk off-roading in tires, I like that too. So can I come on and join you? And I said, Yeah, absolutely. The more, the merrier. So that's how we've assembled this group today. And yeah, if you haven't guessed, today's topic is all things tires. So it is It's just a couple of days before Thanksgiving as we're recording this. We've had a very mild fall here, and now it's starting to feel like winter may be coming. For me, that's the signal that it's trail season and camping and all those things that go with it and a lot of events coming up. What about you guys? Do you all have any rides or anything on the horizon in the next couple of months? Well, Well, this weekend, my friends and I are going out. We're going to go snow wheeling. And up here, I don't know about where you guys live, but here in Oregon, you can buy a five dollar tag and go get your own Christmas tree from the National Forest. Oh, that's cool. We go to the mountains and do that. We don't have National Forest, and we don't have snow. Well, we don't have snow yet. We might get three inches in a couple of months, and everybody will freak out. But yeah. What about you, Andrew? Yeah. Being here in central Tennessee, now it's the time for a break from the heat, so it's time to get out there. My wife and I will probably be out camping or riding our dirt bikes. It is definitely time to get out and hit the trails and enjoy the woods. Nice. Guys, before we dive into tires, why don't you both give us just a rundown of your rig or rigs that you like to get out there and wheel? Nick, I'll let you kick it off. Oh, gosh. Well, I don't know if we have time for all of my rigs. We take up the whole show. We'll go with a couple of your primaries. Primaries? Okay. Gosh, the two in my driveway right now, and then I guess I'll go one in the garage and make it pretty quick. I got a 22 Ford Ranger that's fairly well built up. I don't know if you want me to go into all the specs and all the details. But the one next to it, the 23 Superduty with the 7.3 Godzilla Gasoline big block V8. That's an extra cab, FX4 that I removed the entire bed and replace it with a mitts, Alloy tray and canopy. Oh, nice. Yeah, that's clean. Yeah, that's the long distance, long term expedition rig, and that's riding on Firestone destination MT2 and 37 inch by twelve and a half, 17. And that's it pretty much an unstoppable super capable camping rig. And then I've got a 79 Scout 2 that I'm rebuilding in my garage. That's behind those. But it has no interior right now, so I won't be taking that this weekend. A lot of scout buzz and excitement lately with the new one coming out. They unveiled it just down the road from where I am now, that new one. So, yeah, it looks exciting. It looks a lot more exciting than some of the EVs we've seen. So I'm anxious to see how that plays out. Yeah, I don't want to hijack it too long, but I think I was worried they weren't going to stay to the vibe, the essence of the truck. And I think they really did that, at least in esthetics. Yeah. That's exciting. Well, they got me hooked because I put a deposit down. Oh, okay. See, we didn't even plan this. This is becoming a scout show now. So you're all in, Andrew. Yeah, I like the serial EV concept, the range extender, being able to actually not have range anxiety. I think it would be cool, especially if you're get out in the woods, you don't have to worry about finding a fast charger or whatever. You can still just carry gas cans with you if you needed to. I'm really excited about those new gasoline engines. It seems I don't think it's going to be the wave of the future. I mean, there's gas stations everywhere. It's amazing. There's no rangeings ahead of you. It's just such a novel concept. Is that crazy, guys? All right. You put a deposit down for the Scout. What's your current or past rig, Andrew? Current rig is a 2009 GX 470. It's pretty much stock, at least underneath, but it's got skid plates, rock sliders. I did a DIY shelf sleeping platform in the back. It's got a roof rack with awning and stuff on top, but it's the rig that gets my wife and I where we want to go and then to the coffee shop afterwards. And it's on Firestone destination MT2. So it definitely doesn't look like a mall Crawler. Well, those GXs are a heck of a value for truck, especially that generation. And shout out to our friend Patrick Perry from Perry Parts that just swapped the rear-end in his GX, put the new modified rear-end, removed the 8-inch, and has the 9.5-inch under there after he broke the 8-inch for the third time last time we were out. There is a solution now. He's got it up on his blog. If you're a GX guy, go to a Perry Parts and read up on the Axel Swap. All right. Well, diving into our actual topic for the day to be addressed. I told the guys, I said, I think our audience is is pretty intelligent. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but I think we got some pretty smart listeners. I don't want to make this too basic, and I want to try to get into some of the nitty-gritty. But let's start at a foundational knowledge level, Andrew. Let's start with a modern radial tire versus a bias apply tire. I'm a little bit older than you, I grew up right at the tail end of bias apply still being a common thing in not just heavy equipment, but in any tires. Now people are just used to radial tires. But break that down for us and what the differences are there. Yeah. So the difference is between a biased and a radial is pretty much how the tires put together. Biased is one of the original tire technologies. It was originally fabric, which was cotton fabric that was coated in rubber, and there were layers of those put on, and they were actually put on at an angle or a bias. So that's where the name comes from. And there were several layers of those needed, many, many layers in order to get the strength, especially for heavier vehicles. And so they were thick, they were heavy. They were very much a balloon shape early on before a melted bias became a thing, which is when you start getting your low profile wheels, which are nowhere near as low profile as what we have now. But then with the advent of radials, what tire manufacturers were able to do were take cords and go directly from one beat to another at a 90 degree angle. So if you look at an X ray of the tire, it aligns up with a radius line, hence radial. Uses a lot more modern materials, usually nylon or polyester cords, sometimes steel, depending on the application. And so there's a lot less material, because you usually have two, maybe three body plies in a radial rather than six, eight, 10 or more in a bias plie tire. So they're a lot lighter. They generate less heat. They have better rolling resistance, which especially heat is a big enemy of vulcanized rubber. So they're able to run faster and handle that heat, that speed. So radials are obviously very much the go to for current passenger cars and stuff like that. But Bias still has their place, especially in agriculture and large Earth moving equipment, where they're carrying absolutely immense loads at really low speeds. So they're not generating that heat, and they're able to use that strength of the Bias Play tire to carry those loads. Got you. Yeah. How about Let's talk a little bit about pressure. If you are new to off-roading or overlanding, this always seems to confuse new folks that we like to let air out of the tires before the day even begins. But talk a little bit about air pressure and how that works on different terrains with different tire types. Yeah, so airing down, especially, is a little bit of a touchy subject, I guess, coming from a tire manufacturer. It's interesting fact. We do all of our off-road testing at Placard. We don't air down for doing off-road testing. It just removes one more variable. I always try to tell people, use airing down as a tool in your toolbox. If you immediately drive onto dirt, shift into four low, triple locked, air down, and And then you get stuck. You don't have anything left unless you have a winch. So there are some benefits to airing down. It adds a little bit of comfort, bump absorption. So on rougher, rockier trails, it can be useful for that. It saves your back. But one thing to keep in mind is the air is what actually carries the load in a tire. It is what gives that tire its spring rate. And it's also what dissipates the heat inside the tire. So the more The more air you let out, the more heat it will generate, then it'll be able to dissipate it. So you need to really bring the speeds down. And always have a way to air back up. Don't air down if you don't have a compressor. So that's a given. If even just a little bit of time on the highway at really low pressures. I mean, you can damage that tire internally and not know it. And that damage doesn't get healed. It's compounding. So I don't really have a line in the sand of what you should air down It's very application and situationally dependent, but just some things to keep in mind is you let the air down, you better slow down. Yeah. No, absolutely. A speed has to go along with that. And like you said, I understand it from a manufacturer's perspective. I'm the guy that I'm going to drop to 15 or 16 as soon as I'm at the trailhead, but that suits the terrain that I'm tackling as well. If you're tackling different terrain or if you're in sand or if you're in snow, it's going to be a totally different story than if you're rock crawling somewhere. Yeah, absolutely. I'll just jump in and say- Yeah, go ahead, nick. We've heard people say that airing down to 18 doubles your traction and things like that. There's just so many misnoms and misunderstandings out there that I think, especially if you're thinking, and I can't speak for other tires, but obviously, Andrew has proved in his testing that your tire is very, very capable at the standard placard recommended pressure. So, yeah, right. I mean, to his point, and he's actually changed a lot of my thinking on it, too, because I was like you. I was whacking it down to 15 as soon as we turned on the dirt. But obviously mechanical and personal sympathy, you want to a little bit more cushion when you're hitting rocks and runs and things like that. But now I don't think of it as, oh, my God, I'm not going to get anywhere without this. And it's sidewall size and temperature outside and the material. It's just like there's so many dang variables So if anyone is giving you, if they have a printout on a little card of the rules fairing down their line to you, right? We can agree on that. And no, I don't think it doubles your traction. I wish that was the case. That'd be awesome if you could It's just double the traction. Yeah, it's definitely around here with our terrain. It's a big comfort thing, especially if you're picking up the pace on the rocks a little bit more. When I take my GX up to land between the lakes up on the Kentucky border. There's a lot of small baseball-sized rocks and stuff like that. I let a little bit of pressure out. I won't go down super far, but it's definitely a comfort thing. Along with that, Well, let's just talk about the element in the room as far as terrain and an all-terrain tire versus a mud tire versus an all-season tire. I'm of the opinion, and this is Davie's opinion, and a manufacturer may disagree, that an all-terrain tire means all terrains except mud. Because from personal experience, when you get in Alabama mud or red clay down in Georgia with an all terrain, it just doesn't clean out. It's just going to be slick as snot. But is there an all terrain on the market that is truly that, that can truly go from the mud to the dry and perform well in both? Or is it always a give and take? It's definitely a balancing act with the all terrains. Yeah, I agree down here in the Southeast, you get in that real heavy clay mud, it's going to pack up any tire. Even some MTs just get absolutely turned into mud balls. We have seen an expansion of ATs or all terrain tires that start to bring to that traditional gap of ATs to MTs from hybrid terrain, rugged terrain, whatever you want to call it. But again, it's a balancing act of making it tire more aggressive, but also keeping the road manners. And one of the big trade offs is if you want a tire to be good in mud, you want it to eject that mud from the pattern and re-expose those lugs. But that's the opposite of what you want to do for snow. In snow, you want the pattern to hold some snow because the best traction in snow is snow on snow. Now, not completely covering it, but packing the groups up. That's what good winter tires do. So if a tire is good at ejecting things from the pattern, it's not going to hold any snow, so it won't necessarily be good in the snow. So there's a lot of balancing. The Firestone Destination XT, I think, strikes a really good balance. It does most of what our MT does. And nick can definitely attest to it. He's driven both through pretty much everything. It just it might take a little more skill to drive the XT through some deep stuff or some extra tools that maybe the MT2 would just walk right through. But It does quite a bit. And we test over in North Carolina. So we're very familiar with the red clay that's over in Carolina. Yeah, he just did some testing, too. And I don't know if we're allowed to talk about that yet. But one of the great things about having Decker on the team is super knowledgeable. He's also out there every year retesting the tires and putting them against competitors. And I just saw his data and the XT did very well in the mud It always does. It always has. Even against new competitors, it really stands out. I can speak from my experience. We just had some of our brand ambassadors, Talon, Si, and Michael Webber from Overland Under Budget out in East Carolina for a week. And every single truck, there was six trucks with us. Every truck but Micas was on the MT2. He was on XT. And we were down in some Canyon lands, and it rained, and The Earth out there turns in like Vaseline when it rains. So it was actually pretty hairy. But he is a ranger, a 2019 ranger. Yeah, the wrecked one, I think that he's back together. Yeah, exactly. And he went everywhere that we went in the MT2s without skipping a beat. And talent had actually, as it started raining. I was like, Man, I got on the radio. I'm so glad I have the MT2s. I was like, Well, you'll see. You're about to see how well the XT does in in the mud. And Decker always puts it to me, unless it's the deep stuff, you want the MT, the max traction. But when it's not super deep, the XT has never skipped a beat for us. Well, let's talk a little bit about that testing if we can. Andrew, what about... Just walk us through that process. When a manufacturer tests a tire, I want to know both in the lab, and in the field what that looks like. Yeah. So the lab, which our development center here in the Americas is in Akron, Ohio, the labs that they have there, a lot of what they do is regulatory certification stuff. So they'll, Certify load rating, speed rating, all the DOT certs that go along with getting that DOT stamp on the sidebar. And they'll even do stuff noise testing in some of the anechoic chambers that we have there, the completely silent rooms that have all the microphones. And then we have some outdoor lab proving ground things where we'll do, control wet handling, dry handling, just stopping distances, that stuff. And they're all very controlled environments. And then what I do a lot of is we'll take our off-road tires out to the National Forest, like I said, over in North Carolina. We test with overland experts. So shout out to the OEX crew. Great group of people to work over there with. They've got their private property, but we also test in the forest on some of the trails. And we just really try to do real-world testing. So we'll go out, we'll take two identical 100 Series Land Cruisers, put tires on them, and test them back to back against a list of metrics that we have that we've developed over the years. And we'll even try to get some real world feedback by seeding tires out to media and other power users to be able to get maybe long term use data from people who use the products all the time. And then we do our winter testing in Steemboat Springs, Colorado at the Bridgestone Winter Driving School, as well as up in the UP, up in Michigan. So we're, again, trying to test worst case, real world environments where our tires are put in a service. So before a tire goes into service or goes for sale, what is that timeline like? Is it a year? Is it six months, two years? How long does a tire have to go through testing before you guys say, Okay, this is ready? The design cycle is really long for some of our products. It's several years, sometimes of 10. And in that, there is initial design and development that's all on the computer, that stuff. And then we have a couple of years of testing prototypes. And then by the time I get it, it's pretty mature and ready to be production spun up. And that can take a while as well. So by the time I get it, I have a product, or I'm doing benchmarking of our current products against new competitors as well. Got you. Okay. So you're getting it towards the end of the design cycle, so to speak. But can you give an overview of what that cycle looks like from, I'm assuming, the early sketches, new ideas to the final product? Does it go through? I'm assuming we're not starting on pen and paper now. I'm assuming there's some type of 3D modeling, and then it goes into a prototype and then that thing. I'm not sure about all of our design engineers. There may be some that still do napkin sketches. If it works. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, computers are a big part of it. A lot of modeling softwares being able to do that. We're not breaking new ground as an industry, really. So for our company, we're replacing old products or trying to fill holes in our portfolio when we decide to come up with a new product. And then we'll look at the competitive landscape, what are there other companies doing? What have the requirements changed in the segment we're trying to go after? What are the customers requiring out of these tires now? Because it might have been different than when we introduced the last product. Especially for all terrains, everybody was much more mild. Now people want slightly more aggressive, and they want them to be the do all tires. So it's changed. And then our design engineers, like I said, they'll start iterating. They'll do a first pass, they'll build some prototypes, they'll keep iterating. And during all of this, we'll have our designers also take into account what the esthetic of the tire needs to look like. And eventually, everybody signs off on it and it starts getting industrialized and spun up for production. Got you. Okay. We talked a little bit. We were talking about pressure, and we were talking about heat, and those things. So for a lot of folks, they do... A lot of people have a daily driver that's doing double duty, right? They're wheeling it on the weekend and they're driving it to work Monday morning, and they've got to find that that balance. Do you have any insider tips for maximizing the life of a tire that's living a double life? Because that's not easy on a tire. No, it's definitely not easy for sure. Especially the way some of us drive off road. So the biggest thing is inflation pressure and rotation, rotation on the vehicle. So proper inflation pressure is going to keep that tire contact patch the correct shape on the pavement. It's going to help reduce your regular wear and give you as much wear life as possible. And then regular rotation, every oil change, 5,000, 7,000 miles, however, something like that. Is especially important, especially for deep tread tires, your MTs and stuff like that. Rotating those regularly, getting them rolling in a different direction on the other side of the vehicle helps even out any irregular wear you might have and just really helps get them as much wear life as you can. I'm crazy. I rotate my tires every 2,500 miles just because I want to keep my MTs as smooth as possible. You are crazy. I'm impressed. We'll put it that way. That's dedication. I think, touching on since you said you're... I don't want to go too far into the weeds, but if you said I believe you that your audience is smart, I think maybe, Andrew, it might be interesting to go a little more in-depth because of an example that I found across all my different rigs because they're all modified, none are running the same size tire, the same size wheel. And each tire requires different pressure for the application and the low grading, too. And so even Andrew, we were talking through one of my applications, the vehicle requires the... Placard requires a much higher pressure than you might want to run on the MT2s that I have on that vehicle. And his warning to me was, well, you can do it, but they might start what cupping is the wear-toe? Yeah, heel, toe, cupping. There's a lot of names for the irregular wear where you can see either the pattern get wavy or one block higher than the next. Yeah. If you're not running close to or exactly placard size, which probably very few of us are, determining what that actual pressure needs to be is something that we've got tables. There's industry books that have load and inflation tables. Based off of the load the tire is going to carry, you can determine what the inflation pressure needs to be. And that's going to be unique for everybody's application. There's ways to figure out, especially if you go from a P-metric tire, even on an F-150, it comes with P-metric. Going to an LT, you might need to do a little bit of math to figure out what that new pressure needs to be because the load and inflation curves aren't the same for P-metric versus LT. For folks that may not know, Andrew, break down the difference between a P-metric or passenger tire and an LT tire. So they're really just two sizing schemes. P, yes, usually stands for passenger, but you see it on some half-ton truck, F150 Silverado, stuff like that. It's the OE size. And then LT is light truck is what it stands for. So The big difference is between them, LT usually is able to carry much higher loads, but it requires a lot higher pressures. So on next super duty, the pressures are 80 PSI. You can't do that in a P-metric tire. You have to have an LTE to do those pressures. So it's two different sizing standards is what it is. Got you. I think along with this part of the conversation, let's talk about balancing, about tire and wheel balancing, and your thoughts on that, especially... I grew up where guys were trying to balance these big 40 and 44-inch groundhogs or interco's or whatever it was, and they were putting everything from golf balls to buckshot in the tire. And nowadays, balancing beads are the, I don't want to say the rage, but you hear about that a lot right now. Talk to us about liquid balancing versus speed balancing versus now we've got advanced road force balancing. How do all those play out? The the correct way, I guess, and the industry accepted way is to do spin balancing. Whether you do just spin balancing, which modern machines can get stuff really, really close just through spin. But then you also have road force, which is Hunter's technology, where it'll push on the tire, measure the spring rate as the tire rolls around. It'll try to account for that by strategically placed weights, or it'll tell you to dismount the tire, turn it however many degrees and remount it. It's called force matching. And that will get it as perfect as possible. The bigger tires, 35s and up, they're going to require a lot of weight regardless of what you do, just because you've got the weight. The thread is the heaviest part. It's the farthest away. It's going to cause the most vibration if it's not even. And especially if you run like, beat locks, like good luck getting them balanced. So that's where the advent of the balance speeds and stuff like that people are trying to say, well, it'll move around as the tire moves around. And I came from the Commercial side. I was a field engineer dealing with semi truck and bus tires for a number of years with Bridgeton when I first started. And balanced media is all the rage in that industry. People take the big bag, they'll throw it in when they mount the tire, call it done. But anything you put in the tire has the potential to damage the inside of the tire, especially golf balls and buckshot and stuff like that. I've actually seen golf balls melted to the inside of a tire because it generates so much heat as that thing slings around. So definitely don't do that if you have other options. The physics might be there for the balanced media. I'm still going to use weights when I can. I trust my Balancer that I have. So moral of the story, Andrew doesn't advise it, but if you do put golf balls in, film it and put it on Instagram so the rest of us can see it. All right. We're talking about vehicle weight, and that's obvious that that plays a factor in tires and towing and the load plays a factor in that. What about suspension setups? When somebody's building out an off-road rig or a double duty overlanding rig, and maybe they're changing to a lighter suspension setup, are there factors in how they need to think about the total, I guess you could say, total package between the suspension and their relationship with their wheel and tire choices, particularly the weight of the wheels and tires? That one's a little hard because once you start getting into modified, especially heavily modified vehicles, it really starts... It's becoming a whole system. You have to become a systems engineer almost to tie everything back together. Obviously, if you can run tires that work that are lighter and lighter wheels. Unsprung weight is minimize that as much as you can. But going to 40s, you're not going to minimize anything. Each corner weighs 200. You start worrying about an extra five pounds. Each corner weighs 250 pounds. You can't get around that. The big thing when selecting your tires is what's the actual weight of the vehicle? Because they're what's carrying the weight. Your suspension actually isn't carrying the weight the tires are. So you need to a tire that's properly rated for what your rig weighs, plus the gear and people that you're going to carry. Yeah, I guess that's where I was going with that is people think a lot about the suspension as they're adding weight and adding rooftop tents and adding drawers and all these things to the set up. But the tires are where the weight meets the road, so to speak, not just the suspension. So it's another thought. Your suspension suspends your vehicle above the tires. So what's actually carrying the load is the tires. And going from stock size to load range E tires doesn't magically mean your Tacoma can carry 5,000 pounds. Where do you stand on the wide versus skinny debate? I personally like the pizza cutter look. And I think it is a lot of a It's an esthetic choice for a lot of it. Obviously, the wider you go, the more float you're going to get, which is why they're called flotation tires. They were originally developed for AG and forestry, where they don't want that soil compaction. They actually wanted the vehicles to float over very soft ground. A narrower tire will give you a better clearance and stuff like that because it's not as wide, but it will give you a longer contact patch, which might help in whatever application If you're looking to maximize your forward drive, a longer contact patch might actually be beneficial. Yeah, that's the argument of our friend Ky from a Tinkers Design that's been on the show that I think surprised a lot of people is the data of the longer contact patch. If you think about it, people have been doing it for a very long time with winter tires. When you downsize a winter tire, usually you go taller and skinnier because you want that 4F traction. You want that longer contact patch. Well, if you look at, we go back 80 years and you look at those World War II jeeps, you look at the Willies, I mean, those tires, they couldn't have been 8 inches ride on those tires then. Yeah, interesting. We've talked a little bit about this, but temperature swings. If you've got a tire that you need to perform when it's 110 in the summer and then maybe you're going out next way and it's getting really cold in the winter, do you Have you any advice for managing tire performance in extreme heat or extreme cold? Yeah. So the thing is you need to set your pressures, cold. Cold When we talk about cold tire, that's relative. If it's Death Valley, cold tire will probably be close to 90 degrees. But what we define as a cold tire is something that hasn't been driven more than a mile or has been sitting for more than three hours. And that's the time to set your pressure. You don't want to set it after you just drove from New York to LA. You don't want to adjust your pressures after that. So if you're You're driving in a situation where you go from really hot to really cold to the point where you've lost a bunch of pressure, and if you use pressure gage or you have your TPMS on your dash, you're probably going to want to top them up in the middle of that trip. But definitely don't let air out of a hot tire after you've been driving on the road, trying to, quote, correct it. It will naturally grow in pressure, and it's designed to do that. So it's After the tire cools down, then you can adjust it. Back on the off-road front, talk to us a little bit about side walls, because that seems to be a big topic of debate amongst the manufacturers or the strength of the side walls, especially for somebody that's actually going to get out and put those things on some rocks. And I've noticed across the board in the last 10 years that Sidewall Street seems to have improved, and maybe there's a new technology or a new compound or something that's going on there. But yes, granted, as soon as I say that, I'll probably rip one open here the next time I go out. But it seems like they're more abrasion and impact resistant, more forgiving than they used to be. What is it that makes a really good off-road site a sidewall in a tire? It's mainly the progress that's been made in material science. Like you're saying, yes, from years past, we have made leaps and bounds forward with compound and material You might not think about it, but tire technology moves pretty quickly. Being inside, an insider to the industry and within a manufacturer, the compounding and stuff, it does move along fairly quickly. And we have made some good strides towards cut chip resistance and stuff like that, stronger fabrics that we put in the tires. And that's allowed us to make side walls that don't have to be three inches thick in order to survive rubbing up against a rock. Some of the side walls out there now are quite thin, but also quite robust. And I think a big thing that comes down to that is a lot of the rubbers and stuff that we put in there now. Yeah. I mean, that was one thing that the bias tires were always known for was a little more strength on that sidewall. There's just more layers there. Exactly. But now, with, like you said, the material science updates, it seems like the radials are starting to give you that same streak without having to actually be 10 layers thick or whatever it is. But one of the other misnoms, I guess, is the adding body plies does not necessarily mean your sidewall is stronger. Two versus It's three. There might be a little bit of strength there, but I haven't seen many cuts in a sidewall that stop at that last layer. If they're going through, it's going through. And since all the cords are all laying in the same direction, There's probably an area where it's just pure rubber going right to the inside. So something will slip right in there and slip between all three body plies. I do think it's worth jumping in, and Dave, you may know this, but I think a lot of the folks we encounter still don't. I even saw it in a news story from one of our competitors, Tire, bragging about 14 plywood. It's not. It's not. We had a woman pop a Tire on her P, F150, a P-metric tire in the tow truck cars. Well, it's only because these are only four plywood. You need those 10 plywood. And I was like, well, guess what, girl? I'm going to have got some news for you. You don't even have four. Yeah, I was just going to say that. It's It's not like toilet paper is what we're saying here, guys. No. So the Ply rating is a holdover from bias. When someone says a 10 Ply rated tire, that used to actually be a bias tire with 10 10 plies. Now 10 Ply is equivalent to a load range E. We use load range and load rating as a more accurate representation of what a tire is able to carry in the radial space now. So It's a bit of an archaic way of saying it, but yeah, we've got 10 plie rated tires, and they've got two sidewall plies. I see. It's a bit of an older holdover, and some people get them confused because they use the same nomenclation. That's why I always talk about load rating whenever I talk about how much a tire can carry. And I like to get it out there because people will think they're coming off of a 10-ply tire, you name whatever it says on the side, the brand. And then they go, look at the Firestone Destination XT, fabulous all terrain tire. Well, this is only two-ply. I can't go from 10 to 2. Like, well, you don't actually have 10. So I just want people... I feel like it's misleading Well, the digital Firestone goes with the industry standard. People are still looking backwards the 1950s with their their marketing on the sidewall and making an unfair comparison in the marketplace. So I like to... Sorry if I got my soapbox here for a second. No, I think, hey, you got to question the marketing guys, right? How about you still see, you don't see this as much, but You do see in some off-road tires, directional tires versus asymmetrical tires. What's the advantage, disadvantage there? Why do you see some tires built that way? Yes, like you said, I don't see a lot of directional. I can only think of one asymmetric tire off the top of my head. A lot of the directional stuff you see in the import brands that go on your brodozers. But, yeah, I mean, directional and asymmetric patterns, they have their place. Directional, where the tires designed to roll in a specific direction allows the engineers to be able to design that for aftraction. You see that, I guess a good example would be like tractor pulls as the most extreme version of a directional off-road tire. It's meant to do one thing, and that's put the power to the ground in one direction. An asymmetric, it allows you to do the same thing, but laterally. It allows you to tune inside and outside of the contact patch. You see it a lot in high performance tires, where the outside shoulder will be a lot wider than everything else. So it's really in what the goals of the tire are and what they feel the design engineers feel will meet that goal. I think seeing a lot of symmetrical, same side to side, rolling in either direction off road tires, what that allows you to have is consistent traction in every direction, no matter which way you load it, it's going to act the same. It also helps with your regular wear, because now you It can rotate around the vehicle. It can roll either way with a directional tire. You can only swap it front to back. As symmetric, you have to be careful what way you mount it. Make sure you don't mount it backwards, stuff like that. So symmetrical in the off road space, I think, is definitely why everyone's gone that way is because of those reasons. It's predictable and easier on the user. Got you. One thing I wanted to ask you about, which I think is controversial subject is sipping. We see a lot of guys go on YouTube and see guys talk about sipping their tires. Again, this may be terrain dependent on what part of the country you're in and that thing. But is sipping something that people, in your opinion, should be considering doing to their own tires, or should they trust the engineers and the factory sipping that's there? I would hope they would trust We pour a lot of R&D dollars and resources into designing our stuff. And I have to say, do not modify your tires. Not only is it can avoid any warranty, but it's not safe to do. We put features there or not there for a reason. And cips, a lot of people will be like, oh, well, I need more biting edges, and that's why they'll a tire. And that does help on some smooth surfaces. You look at winter tires, they're very heavily cipped to help with snow traction. And that's what cips do. They give you a void for water and snow to evacuate out of the contact patch. But with the advent of 3D cips, where there's actual... The cip is not just a blade that goes straight into the tire. It actually has some geometry in there. It looks like an interlocking Waffle iron, essentially. And what that allows is it allows you to have that void and all that at advantage is of having all those types. But then under high loads, that 3D geometry will lock together, and it will allow the block to maintain some rigidity. So we do all that in simulations and all that stuff. So you go take a hot knife to our tires, it just makes us cry. All right. So you heard it from the source. No golf balls, no hot knives per decer on your tires. It's also another holdover, I think, from it feels like the '70s to me, especially Especially up north. I know that was a big thing from back in the day. I used to see it back in my commercial days. There was a bus company up in Vermont that they would sipe their tires, and the tires would get absolutely destroyed with your regular wear after just one season. But the guy was adamant, and he did it himself. And I was just like, please don't do this. But he just kept doing it. I have a friend up in Montana who has gotten another brand's MTs for years and then ciped them. And he said, well, I wanted to get him some empty twos. And he said, I don't know. I want to cip these. And I'm like, you don't need it. Trust me, with new compounds, especially, it's not the 1970s anymore. Especially our MT2s are so good in the wet and the snow, especially compared to modern competitors, but even certainly old stuff. He likened it to, well, you get a Corvette, you're going to soup up that LS. I said, that's not the same. It's like when Homer on the Simpsons put speed holes in the hood of his car. Speed holes? Yeah, speed holes. You're ruining me. It's not the same as tuning an LS. Trust the engineer, please. Well, you're talking about the 3D side thing and maybe things that you don't see to the eye that are engineered into the thread pattern. I mean, it's easy to look at a tire and go, oh, this has big lugs. This must be a really good mud tire because it's got such deep lugs. But are there other less obvious factors in Tread design nowadays, modern Tread design that you may not notice if you're just looking at a tire with the eyeball that you can educate us on? Well, nick hit on it. The one that you can't see, and it's really hard to differentiate is the compound of what it's made out of. Yeah, you can have treads that look chunky. You're like, oh, that must be a good mud tire. It's got a real tight interlocking pattern. That's going to be good for good traction or good snow traction because of all the biting edges or whatever. But yet the compound, especially, like I said, the strides that we've made in our rubber technology, really has driven forward. You could have very similar tires with similar tred patterns. But if you've got different compounds, they could act drastically different. So That's one of the things. And it's, again, really hard for the consumer to differentiate because they don't know what's in the rubber. They don't know what's good. They have to rely on reviews, which isn't really standardized across the industry. It's not even counting what you find on YouTube. But one of the other things to look for is full depth features. So if those cips or the slots and the roofs will actually go all the way down to where the tires considered worn out, so they won't wear away. And you lose some of those features which could degrade performance over the tires life. If you find full depth types or full depth features that will help maintain some of that new tire performance as the tire wears on. Got you. Okay. Andrew, you were talking about load ratings, and we understand load ratings when you're talking about the weight of the load, whether it be in a pickup truck bed or whether it be that you're towing something. But let's talk about the load ratings on a tire and how that helps or hurts in an off-road scenario. It would seem from a layperson that a heavier load rating is presumably going to be a stronger tire from a like a sidewall perspective. But maybe that's maybe that is or maybe that isn't the case. But there's always a trade off. So what's your thoughts on on load rating when you're looking at a truck or a tire that you're going to wheel? So in the past, yes, the higher load ratings would probably adversely the effect ride quality because the tire would have to have more material or thicker material. But with modern science and materials that we've put into the tire, we've been able to make stronger tires with the same amount of material, more or less, which allows you to not trade off that ride quality even at the higher load ratings. Now, getting a higher load rating than what you need isn't necessarily bad. Bad, but it doesn't magically increase your payload. You just need to keep in mind that there may be some ride quality degradation going to a higher load rating. And with a higher load rating, the tire is stronger because it's meant to hold more inflation pressure. The maximum inflation between a load range C and a load range E is different. Load range E will hold more pressure, so it does actually have to be stronger. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's more durable. The sidewall is not more puncture resistant because it can now carry more 80 PSI or whatever. I'm wearing a Firestone hat, but I'll throw Bridgestone some love. Our new douler, AT Ascent, is an incredibly comfortable tire on the road, even when it's a load range E. It's one of the best tires I've ever driven on when it comes to highway manners for a really capable AT tire. So it's like the perfect example of you don't have to trade off comfort for load carrying capacity. Got you. Yeah, because it has been a trade off, and especially we talked about a truck that you're wheeling on the weekend and going to work. But then if you throw, it's a vehicle that you're also towing with, there's a whole third aspect that you got to think about that. And if you can find a tire that covers all three of those and does it comfortably, that's pretty impressive. It's the Goldilocks It's a mythical tire that does everything really well. And it also probably would last 100,000 miles, but everything's a trade-off, unfortunately. This just came to mind when You talked about lasting 100,000 miles. Talk to us from an engineer's perspective about the age of tires, about the DOT rating as as tire age, because you will inevitably meet somebody that's running a 20-year-old set out on the trail that swears up and down, there's nothing wrong with these tires. They're not dry rotted. I can't see anything wrong with them. I know you've got a thought on that, Andrew. Go ahead. Yeah, you can probably see on my face. I'm getting my eyes starting to twitch. So The entire age is, or at least what the acceptable age out limit is, is basically by manufacturer. Bridgestone aligns with JATMA, which is the Japanese Tire Manufacturers Association, and we draw the line at 10 years. When a tire reaches 10 years, it should be taken out of service. It needs to be replaced. When you get to five years, it should be inspected by a tire professional. And that includes possibly dismounding it and taking look at the inside because as air permeates from being in the tire and out, as well as UV rays and ozone from the outside, it can degrade the tire internally, where you can't actually see it. So it might not have the weather checking or the ozone cracking, but it could be degrading. And you can tell by older tires, they do feel harder because that's the ozone aging the rubber. So consult your tire manufacturer. Don't run it over 10 years. It's not worth the risk. Also, check your spare tires because usually those are very old. There are many folks that are guilty of that. It's not a contest to see who can keep their original spare the longest. No. All right. Well, you've talked about some of just the modern things as far as is material science and 3D modeling and that thing over the last few years. Are there any trends or advancements that you're excited about that maybe we don't see in production yet, but we'll see over here for the next few years, especially in the off-road scene? I think we're already seeing it, but I'm excited to see where these hybrid rugged terrain, middle of the road, not an AT, but not quite MT segment goes. Jack of all trades, tire used to be a master of none. Right. Yeah, that was my opinion. But with improving compounds, like I've said, construction techniques and materials, the design that all the design tools that the manufacturers have at their disposal, it's now instead of become two buckets, AT and MT, it's now more of a spectrum. It's what do you want out of the tire? And it's really been able to get closer to that Goldilocks tire. But that's what I'm really excited to see is how far can this get pushed? Can you have one tire that does it all? I think that's what they need to call it. If they get it figured out, it needs to be the Goldilocks line. That's the market. Goldilocks MTs. All right. Well, one more question. Is there anything in your profession, and you've been doing this a while, that that you think are common myths that people believe about tires, or maybe how they handle tire decisions that you'd like to debunk? There's a lot out there. We could probably do a whole podcast just on debunking tire myths, and maybe we could do that. But I think one of the things is there's a lot of groupthink, and people get in echo chambers in a forum or they've been a diehard one brand forever. And you need to see what else is out there. And take every review you see with a grain of salt, because like nick has said, there's a lot of misconceptions about load rating and plywood rating versus what the actual tire is made out of. They're not the same. Adding plis does not necessarily mean it's more durable. And then airing down There's a lot of misconceptions around airing down. You can be very conservative like me and the way we do our testing where you never really let anything out of the tire. But depending on what you go up, you might need to let air out in order to get that tire to conform around the the obstacle or whatever. But you're not going to double your contact patch by taking 10 pounds out of the tire, running 10 pounds in your tire. That's just not how it works. So I would like to see more people just try to learn more and learn from the people who actually build these products. And we try to do that as Bridgestone. We try to educate as much as we can, but just being able to think through it. And I don't think tires are really that complicated. So people try to make a mountain out of a mole hill sometimes. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on and talking through this. And Like you said, I know we only scratch the surface, but I think you've provided some insight, and you've definitely provided some food for thought for a lot of us that have been doing this for several years. It's easy to get in a rut and believe what you've always believed or make the same decision you did before where the data and the science maybe will tell you something different nowadays. That's been good. Before I let both of you go, though, we have to go through our rapid fire wrap-up questions. Oh, boy. Yeah. All right, Andrew, we'll start with you. First question, what is your favorite, your go to off-road trail snack? I'm going to have to say Twizzler's licorice nibs. Oh, that's a very specific Twizzler licorice nibs. Those are the little- Yeah, the A little short ones. Short ones? The little white-size ones, yeah. Okay. Now, do you turn down full-size Twizzlers if you can't get the nibs? Yeah, I'll go to something else if I don't have nibs. Oh, wow. Okay. All right. All right, nick, what do you got? Oh, I'm going to go in the similar candy. I'll go peach rings. Peach rings? Like the old school ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah Yeah. Awesome. Okay. This is interesting. I don't know if we had anybody go candy first. So okay. The Firestone crowd is on the candy. You got a sweet tooth. All right. Andrew, if you could only listen to one artist or one album while you're out on the trail for the day, what are you queuing up? That's an easy one. Meteora by Lincoln Park. Meteora? By Lincoln Park. Okay. Didn't even have to think about it. Nick, what you got? Whalen Jennings, Dreaming My Dreams. Oh, okay. Little old school country. Nice. All right. There's not much of that left in Nashville, but that's a whole another rant for another show. Yeah, I could go on about that. All right. Important question here. Andrew, DeWalt or Milwaukee? Team Yellow. There we go. I like that answer. Don't beat yourselves up. It's okay to be wrong. He's got the red and black jacket on. All right. All right, here's a new one. Andrew, first vehicle that you ever owned? This one was... It It was my first car. It was a 1989 Ford Tempo. It had 20,000 miles on it when I got it because I got it from my great grandmother. Oh, nice. Okay. The mythical inherited low mile. Oh, yeah. It did sit in the garage for 15 years before I got it. And I bet you put a new set of tires on it before you drove it. I didn't know anything about tires back then. Did you put a sub in the trunk? No, but it did replace all four speakers. Those paper cones, it just deteriorated. Yeah. Nick, what was your first one? 1983 Volvo 245 Turbo Wagon. Nice. Nice. The tank. Yeah. All right. Wrapping up another controversial topic here. Roof top tent or ground tent? Can I say hammock? Oh, wow. Door number three with the hammock. Okay. Yeah, we'll take hammock. That would be my choice. I'm a rooftop 10 guy myself. All right, you're in. Okay. All right. Well, again, gentlemen, this has been fun. We may have to continue this and do Decker's top 10 tire myths to be debunked as part two. I like that. I might have to not wear the branded merchandise for that. Okay. All right. That's fair enough. Corporate, you can stop listening now. But no, good deal. I appreciate you guys making the time, and we will call this one a wrap. Thank you again. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.