Alaskan Mog Eye-Candy

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charlieaarons

Explorer
Rob, changing a tire on the rim in the field is easy with these rims. The hard part is inflating them. A bicycle tube is required to seat the beads. I've been trying to get my bead locks installed. So far unsuccessfully despite the use of boom trucks. I'm have 2nd thoughts about them. Dis-assembling a beadlocked wheel in the field might be impossible. The tradeoff is not dropping psi below the mid 20s which is an issue only for the front, since my prescribed sand pressures for load are 32 in the rear and 16 in front.

Doug there is another tire you should know about. 7.50R16 XZY Michelin. 3300 lb single, 3140 dual at 100 psi. If you can still find them. Dimensionally it would better than the 8.25s.

Charlie
 
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F

FusoFG

Adventurer
dhackney said:
One of the things I think we did right during the build was to do repeated field testing and weigh-ins. That has helped us make design and materials decisions along the way. I encourage anyone building a rig, especially neophytes like us, to find a way to do the same.

Weighing the rig during tests and the chassis during the build can help minimize unpleasant surprises.
Click to expand...

Definitely a good idea to weigh the camper as you build.

Also a good idea is to know the weights of each major (and some minor ones) as you design.

Obvious benefit is keeping the weight balanced side to side.

A less obvouis benefit is estimating axle loads.

Anything you mount between the axles is going to add weight to both axles. How much on each axle depends on how close you mount something to a particular axle. The closer to the front axle, for instance, the bigger percentage of a components weight is put on the front axle.

If you mount a component in front of the front axle(like a heavy bumber and winch), it adds even more than that components weight to the front axle depending on how much in front you mount it.

And, it reduces the load on the back axle by that the excess amount!

Conversely, anything you can mount behind the rear axle will lighten the load on front axle depending on how much it weighs and how far back it's mounted.

Remember playing on a see saw as a kid?

That's why a lot of campers are overloaded on the front axle - everything tends to get mounted behind the cab and, in an effort to keep the rear overhang at a minimum, in front of the rear axle. And therefore almost everything adds some weight to the front axle.

Heavy winch on the back - good; heavy winch on the front - not so good.

Unless you have Charlie's front axle capacity.
 
C

charlieaarons

Explorer
Well, my wife has expressed a desire for a "cabin" to berry pick and clam-dig etc. Also she wanted a "motorhome" (I think she was thinking about a Class C piece of junk). Of course you need to do these things at different locations. Thus, a movable cabin. I'll probably have time off work the first 2 weeks in July. My daughter got a college grant to do geology research along the Dalton Hwy in the Brooks Range with a professor and research assistant the first week, but we're free the second week. There's a very impressive Unicat truck that may be in Alaska this summer. It's a MAN TGA 28.480 6X6 chassis on 16.00R20s, with a 7 meter camper with raising roof. It's on the European Unicat site (www.unicat.net) as the EX70HD-2M (under "vehicles"/"experience"). We travelled with them in Morocco, my wife felt we were "slumming it" in our tiny rig. They're from Lille, France.

You get the spare up and down with a chain hoist. it's relatively easy. The unmounted spare on the roof comes down with gravity and tied to a rope to restrain it from disappearing. It only comes down if another tire is destroyed and left along the road as a souvenir for someone (else). It goes on with a forklift or boom truck at a tire shop.

Charlie
 
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