Driving on a temp spare?
 

Ok, Ive been searching around and have seen all the "skull and crossbones" warnings about using temporary spare tires beyond their intended limits.

Here is my dillemma:

The trike im building, will use a motorcycle rear wheel, and the one I want to use, form a rebel 250 is only 2.5" across x 15" I could go with a magna wheel which still is only 3" wide.

No such thing as a car tire I can find that narrow.. (anybody know of any?)

There are plenty of 125/80/15s littering the junkyards in the backs of cars as space saver spares though, $5 buys them all day long.

What I am really interested to know is if anyone out there is driving on them either out of nessissity (no dough for new tires) or as a hypermiling maneuver after the listed 100 miles do they in fact self destruct?

Or is the service life warning more in line with "dont drive your car too far with a tire that isnt matched diameter wise with the others" or "Dont drive too far with your 3000 pound car on these tiny tires"

(I would be using one on the rear on a 1000lb (with people) trike)

Any input?
Thanks

Interesting side note, for all the talk, I did an "exact match" search in google for "temp spare blowout" "Temporary spare blowout" and "doughnut spare blowout" in images and web search

results: 0

I then did a search for "necrophiliac clowns" and there were matches! lol

My nickels' worth of a two bit opinion is that you are right about the tire and the warnings. The design objective is to reduce the space required for the spare without puting the driver at risk when using the spare. The warning is for people who want to know as little as posible about thier stuff. The alternative to this consise warning lable would be a treatise on the physics of tires, that few would read, and even fewer would understand. I have thought about doing a test run on 4 of these temporary spares to see how they affect FE, but have not done so yet.

Discussion here: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...onomy-189.html

That thread was good, but the question remains, how long would one of these buggers last holding up about 400 lb on the rear of a trike?

Why aren't you just using the motorcycle tire that fits that rim? It should be good for quite some time at 400lbs.

Good question Denny! to be honest the main reason is I just thought that cars that dont lean belong on non round tire profiles (not scientific at all)

I wonder the real world impact of running a motorcycle tire, traction in turns, traction in turns in the rain weighed against the benefits / drawbacks of the temp spare (or a bigger traditional tire for that matter)

I have 155/80R15 tires on my car right now. They are real BFGoodrich tires. Max sidewall pressure is 55psi and max speed is something like 140? That size is often used as front tires on drag cars so they are readily available. I bought mine from tirerack.com for ~90 each.

I had to mount them on spare rims. Nissan Altima spare rims have a DOT stamping on them and look very normal.


I hope they are Narrow enough to fit on your project. They are ~5" on the tread and ~6" at the widest point on the sidewall. Good luck.

Im running these on the front: Continental ContiEcoContact EP

Using these on the rear would be great, except the MC wheel is 2.5" for the rebel and 3" for the magna Im not at all confident the 4.5" wide 145/65/15 would go on either of those rims.

The Citroen 2CV (ugly duckling) used 125/??/15 tyres - that's the thinnest I've ever seen on a car.

Why not use touring motorcycle tyres ?

Nope.
I've done just short of 1000 miles on one (Pirelli) while waiting for my 17" wheels to arrive.
It was on the driven front axle, which also carries the highest load.

No hypermiling back then, but I stuck to 100kph / 62mph on the highway and reduced cornering speed.

It still has a little bit of thread left in it.
I doubt temp spares would last longer than a regular, single compound, touring-oriented MC tyre.