00:00:13 Speaker 1: Welcome to gear Talk Podcasts on the Hospitals with me as always, Jordan's budd is here. This week we've got Clay Croft coming in to chat with us. Clay is from x Overland. X Overland is a company that's doing content around overlanding. If that doesn't mean anything to you, overlanding, just look this up on Wikipedia. As they defined it is also known as four wheel dot four wheel drive touring, self reliant overland travel to remote destinations where the journey is the principal goal. I think that's a pretty good definition. Basically, it's car camping in badass rigs that are built out to like go through across over crazier stuff, probably than I do on regular basis, but like they're pushing the limits where they're going. You can obviously go check out there. They've got a great YouTube channel with all kinds of cool places they've been. They've done this all over the world. They've gained a lot of experience about, uh, you know, with just like going through crazy stuff. So we figured it'd be very advantageous for us as hunters and anglers who often get you know, drive down roads that you know aren't quite perfect and you can get yourself in situations and Claike is going to walk us through how to base how to get unstuck. He calls it vehicle immobilization. There's two kinds. We've got basically getting stuck where you can't use your wheels anymore, and then you've got mechanical immobilization where or no, do you call it elect mechanical mechanical and electrical or was it one or the other breaking down? Breaking mechanical okay? And then with within that you could have electrical breakdown where you could have you know, and engine quits work and uh or you know, battery goes out, whatever it might be. So anyways, we're going to talk to him about uh, basically about getting rigs unstuck and what you might need to have with you so that you can feel confident getting getting into you know, crazier locations to go find a big bull elk. 00:02:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, we we talked about my latest vehicle immobilization a while back in a different episode. I got stuck and I pulled myself out with the wind. 00:02:48 Speaker 1: That's right. You have to ask him if that's what he would have done too. 00:02:53 Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm interested to hear about those recovery boards. He's going to talk about some recovery boards. Have not used those, but heard a few people that have, So yeah, it'll be a super interesting episode. 00:03:03 Speaker 3: I'm excited to talk to them all right before. 00:03:06 Speaker 1: We get Clay in here, though, what have you been up to, Jordan? 00:03:10 Speaker 3: Oh? 00:03:11 Speaker 2: This last weekend, as we recorded, it was a Memorial Day weekend, we went out and did a little bit of bear scouting. We've just seemed to have a there's just a ton of snow up in the mountains. 00:03:21 Speaker 3: Still. 00:03:22 Speaker 2: There was one road that usually is open at the beginning of May and it just now opened about four days ago, so trying to get in there. That's where we're gonna do some bear hunts. So we ripped around on the side by sides a little bit and went up some roads that were all had trees knocked over on them and we ran into snow, and so just trying to logistically get figured out where we can even get to this next week on this hunt. And then other than that been spring gosh, spring organizing and trying to break all the gear out and figure out what needs tent steaks and what needs new guidelines tied on to it and you name it, doing some fixing stuff. Got the side by sides in getting all the clutch is getting pulled apart and cleaned and YadA YadA, just like all the spring cleaning things for getting ready for the summer in this fall. So that's what I've that's what we've been up to the last little bit. 00:04:24 Speaker 3: What about you. 00:04:25 Speaker 1: I'm making a note right now that says email Chili regarding condition of crew tepee because you just reminded me when you talk about tent steaks and guyelines. I was when we did that bear hunt. We used some of some Meat Eater geared for our crew tent, and yeah, I was not happy with the condition of it when I pulled it out of the pulled it out. It was definitely not been checked since the last hunt went on. And I can tell you what the last hunt that teepee went on was when all Clay Nukeom and Steven Ranella and the Meat Eater crew took it up to Alaska and we had zippers that weren't working good. There's burn holes in it, there were The guyline situation was just horrendous. I mean, it's not that you can't have five different types of para cord. But I mean stuff that had been you know, three pieces tied together and just tied in crazy locations, like it just wasn't put away ready for the next person. So luckily we have a gear manager and he's hopefully he'll be able to bring the hammer down on whoever's responsibility that it's. 00:05:38 Speaker 3: Supposed to be and bring it back to life. 00:05:40 Speaker 1: Yeah. No, which is great. It's easy to do on the I mean taking an hour and that tent would be rocking and rolling again. But I actually, when we were just camping this weekend doing some late season turkey hunting my seak outside Redcliffe, I'd pitched a few really bent tent steaks and hadn't replaced them, and so I was not fully secured, and uh maybe through just fine, just kind of had to be smart about which uh, you know, which spots of my little TP I wanted to stay down on which ones I didn't. But yeah, super uh, super smart thing to do. It's probably best just to buy like a hundred pack. That way, you always just have extra ones in the garage or in the truck or whatever. And and all of a sudden when you're like, oh man, look at that thing because the bent ones. Man, I've tried hammering them back and they just seem like once you bent them once, it just bend the second and third and four times so much easier. You know. 00:06:38 Speaker 2: Yeah, they say that's why you shouldn't press them in with your foot. It is because they'll bend easier. If you're trying to press them in with your foot and you hit a rock or something, it'll like bend them over, Whereas if you have like another rock or a hammer or something, it'll like knock the stake through the rock, or if the rock is impassable, then it just won't go and you have to change locations for it. 00:07:00 Speaker 1: But that's interesting. I know you've told me that before. I'm still I'm still a little incredulous about that. I need to talk to a real like a physics professor. 00:07:10 Speaker 2: I mean I still do it. Oh yeah, I still do it, but I I've heard that you should not do that. 00:07:15 Speaker 1: It's better to I just don't understand how it's better to pound it. I would think that even the pounding it would bend it all the same if you if you hit a rock. But I don't know, maybe there could be something to it. Let me see, Yeah, Memorial Day weekend. For me, it's my birthday weekend. And uh. And so we decided to go turkey hunting. I was gonna do both daughters, but then with a buddy of mine and he's got one boy. But so the youngest said, well, I'm gonna be the third wheel, so I'm balance. So luckily we've got family in town. She was able to stay with them, and we went turkey hunting, and man, it was fun, good camping. But we definitely experienced late season turkey hunt, which means that I think that quite a few of the gobblers were gobbled out. That's a fun way of saying that, just like they weren't playing ball anymore. We found one that was gobbling. He didn't really he would gobble at everything, but was not interested in the coming of the call. And whether that's from pressure or just from being late in the season hard to say. But so I sent this young man, Grady, on a bushwhacken mission, and I just stayed back and would hit the box call every you know, two three minutes and just see if I could get that bird to gobble so that he would give away his location. And so he and his dad. I know, my daughter was sleeping, and he and his dad were just sitting there chilling, chit chatting, kind of glassing over to where we had seen the bird go and kind of took a little while. And after a while we're wondering, man, wonder what's going on? Is he on him? Is he not? We hadn't heard the bird gobble in a while, so I hit the box call I got, I think, two more times, and later Grady said, man, I had no idea where he was, but then you made him gobble two more times and I got to beat on him and I had cover between him and I and I just he had to sprint across the field get behind the cover. And this kid's pretty amazing. I think he's out there. I think he's twelve now, and he's like I knew he was right behind this little ridge and I just peeked over that little ridge and he looked at me, but it was too late and he boomed him. So we got one bird out of the deal. But man, we put in some power loops. Power loops, especially for eleven and twelve year olds. I think every day we did roughly ish. This is basically by doing math by counting how many steps the iPhone says you took. But we had a couple eighteen thousand day eighteen thousand steps days, which I think are roughly two thousand steps is a mile. That's what you find online. So yeah, do the math, you know, eight nine miles. And you know, kids, my daughter forgot her hiking boots, so she did this all in insulated muck boots in seventy five degree weather. Never complain that was good. But anyways, we could not rustle up another gobble, talk to two or three hens I think in two days that would talk back to me. But just couldn't get anybody to gobble again. So you're left to think that it's either just over or you know, you know, we don't hunt a high density turkey area in a lot of places in Montana, and so maybe just the drainages that you checked it and have turkeys in them. But it was tough. And again I can't say it was there was no turkeys or just the end of season or what what. We did have a really cool day. It was the first day. Six bears in one day. 00:10:59 Speaker 3: Six nice. 00:11:00 Speaker 1: Yeah, like we're sitting there hunting turkeys, looking at a beautiful little meadow, thinking, man, this is this is where i'd be if I was a turkey, nice little strut zone. And all sudden Grady is like, oh no, we're looking there. A couple of elk walk through there. It's kind of like a young bull. He's got I don't know, six inches of antlers poking out, and then it might have been a spike behind him. They kind of come trotting through all happy, and we're glassing them. And then Grady says, well, look right behind where those elks just were, there's a bear. I'm like, no way, and uh, sure enough, nice sized black bear just sitting there chilling. 00:11:35 Speaker 4: You know. 00:11:35 Speaker 1: We're watching it and like, oh this is great, you know, like National Geographic got some elk seeing a bear. Five minutes later, a big old cinnamon dude pops out right below this black one. The best we could figure probably a mating pair, right, that's what we're thinking. Yeah, they kind of they There wasn't anything too romantic about the encounter, but definitely the you know, the black bear did a few or the black faced black bear did a few circles and then sort of wandered off and the cinnamon colored bear, which looked the same size or bigger than the black one, kind of filed the same trail and then followed that black one. So we figured sound and a board doing their thing. Well, we go around, We basically go off the ridge. They went right. We went on the left side of the ridge, and we're standing, you know, over a little on a little precipice and make a few calls. Grady walks out there a little farther and he's waving us all over. Immediately, I'm like, oh, sweet, maybe he glassed up some turkeys. He's like, there's a bear in the top of that tree. Like what, there's no way. You just like looked over there and saw a bear in the top of this tree one hundred yards away. Sure enough, we glass it. There's two cubs in the top of this ponderosa pine, and like, wow, that's that's the cool deal. So again, best we can figure is that probably when that boar rolled in that sal ran those two cubs up that tree, and then you know, just keeping safe from the board, they went and you know, doing their thing. I'm guessing she's gonna come back and get them. So at that point we're like, wow, amazing day, right, four bears, like I don't know, ninety minutes two hours later walking down another ridge and just we're on a big loop and or no, we had set up. We're calling and we look up on the hill and here comes the you know, medium sized adolescent bear kind of rolling through middle of the day. All of this too, and then again we kept hiking, and later towards the end of our little loop, we're walking, you know, down a drange and look up on the hill and there's a medium sized bear just sitting on his haunches and looking at us. So there's a chance that that one could have been I mean, we were within a mile probably where we saw the one running, so we could have seen the same bear twice. But maam, you know I hunted for a whole week two weeks weeks ago and saw two light bears and just out Turkey hunting scene. 00:14:05 Speaker 3: Sick, so new new bear spot. 00:14:10 Speaker 1: Yeah, it could be. The quote is pretty low in the zone. I don't think it's known for having a lot of bears. Quota closes pretty quickly. But yeah, I guess you could go there and hunt them up. It could be fun. So yeah, sweet AnyWho. 00:14:28 Speaker 2: Well, Yeah, speaking of just what we were talking about earlier, getting gear ready and stuff. For our listener question this week, we had Brock Wilson send an email in and he was asking, in the early season, or I would say in the spring season as well, is it worth taking a floorless tint just to have to buy an insert or a tarp basically just an insert for the bugs making the floorless tent a floored tent. And I know when you when we were getting ready to go to Alaska, you did a little video on your FLORALSS setup and then you you had a nest in it as well, which is basically it's a floor with a bug netting. And you got a few questions just like this, like why are you using a floralless tent and then getting an insert to make it floored? You basically have a floorid tent. Why why are you doing that? 00:15:18 Speaker 3: What? What's your what was your kind of take on that? 00:15:22 Speaker 1: Well? I think that the my loss for words here and gives you options, right Like the one that I use most often is the seak out side Redcliff or the Cemarron. They're pretty much the same thing. The Red Cliffs advertised as a six person. Cimarron is a four person. I think I usually drop both those down to uh down by two. We've actually done our whole family in the Cimarron. It's just you know, a little bit tighter. But you gotta remember too with these floor less shelters, right and again options so you have the outer shell, you can just have like the single layer. Then you can put in a liner, right just like you just like you have two layers. In most any kind of just a free standing backpack, classic backpacking tent, you're gonna have condensation on your outer layer. It just happens, right, So if you have that second layer on the inside, whether it's a screen or like seac outside basically makes these very thin white liners, it gives you that protection from that condensation when you're moving around in there. A lot of times I don't run those, but it's there. Right. Then you also have the option to add in a ness, which is like you said, it's basically just one hundred percent mesh with a with the floor that will also act sort of as a second layer as well as keeping you, uh you know, free free from bugs. Definitely. When we hunt now in the spring in Montana, we're always using those nests because of ticks. A lot of ticks around and uh there's the big dog ticks, so you really don't have to worry too much about what they about what they carry. But you know, nobody likes getting, you know, ticks all over them, having to have full ticks. So yes, I get once you once you do put that in there. But it's like a lot of other tents, you don't have the option to run with or without. It's kind of like it comes one way as it is. Even though even that being said, like this past weekend, it was just my daughter and I in a tent and we had one nest set up. We both slept in there, all of our gears on the other side of the tent. It's very spacious, very roomy. I can stand up in it get dressed. That's a huge plus for me. And and the big thing is is that you have like your sleeping zone that can stay dry, tick free or whatever, and then your gear zone because it's floorless, you walk in there with your boots on. Let's just say you come back to camp and it's it's a downpour. Right in car camping, we had these little healing ox camp triers with us super small, kind of sit lower the ground, so they're perfect inside a teepee. But it's pouring rain. Jump in there, open the zipper, two people get in there, zip it down, the nest, sleeping bag, all that stuff is off to the side staying dry, and you're in there soaking wet, but you can there's enough room that you can take off your rain gear, put it off to the side, take off your you know, muck boots or whatever boots you're wearing, put them off to the side. And you didn't have to take the boots off before you got into the tent, right to do that, because most of the time standard backpacking set up there's a small little vestibule, but you have to sort of undo your laces as you're crawling in, and then you pop your boots off real quick, leave them under the vestibule and crawl into the main tent. Right yep. And I think that's just like that, going through that motion right there is worthwhile for me to have that the bigger space of the floorless tint, so you can so you can basically walk in and and the same thing in the morning. Right, you just have a lot of room to get dressed, put your boots on, you're sleeping zone, all that stuff. Still staying super tidy, dry clean, but you've got the space to you know, it's a deal with wet gear and dirty gear and not just not feel crammed. There's so much bigger, there's so much more room. 00:19:48 Speaker 2: Yeah, the space to weight ratio. Like you could have a basic two man backpacking tent that caught or that weighs four pounds, and you know it's set up to where two people can stay, can sleep side by side in it. And then you can have something like you're talking about Cimmarron. You can have with the nest and the pole and all the steaks and all the things. You might be at four pounds maybe, but you have so much more space, especially when you're comparing it just to that little tent for two people. You can have two people sleeping ways apart from each other, plus room for all their gear, and then plus you can run a stove with it in the later season. So that's just it, and that's just an extra I think, folks, and sometimes too, like you know, in the spring you're talking about, and I think sometimes in the summer at lower elevations you'll want You'll want that nest for like ticks, and then there is like a bug issue there can be, But in September, if you're just hunting the high country like for mule deer and your way up above alpine, there's not really that many bugs up there. There really isn't like it gets pretty cold at night, like you're not gonna be fighting on know, there's exceptions to everything, but a lot of times those times I'm just taking I'm just taking the floorless, just the canopy with me. I'm not taking a nest, so I'm even lightening it up more than that and saving on space. 00:21:14 Speaker 1: So in those situations, all you really are bringing it for is because you need shelter from rain, wind, possibly snow and uh yeah, and people I think to have a there's a misconception that somehow water is gonna go down the tent and then just like start immediately seeping inwards into this floorless shelter. It just doesn't happen. Maybe in super crazy wet environments you might have to dig a little trench around the outside, but actually we did have to do that once in on Prince of Wales. I mean that's a place where it rains eleven feet a year. It's the only place I've ever had to do that. Yeah, you can use them and sometimes if you set them up in the right spot and it's raining, I've done this on bear hunts and it's still raining, but you can still there's there roomy enough where you can have the door still propped open and still be glassing, you know, across a drainage, and sure your window of you know, the width of your of your field of vision is a little it's smaller. But look, you're you're dry and comfy inside of a tent, not having to sit out there in your rain jacket. You're in your tent, but you're still hunting and you're comfortable. And uh, you know, for me, a lot of it comes down to I'll hunt harder and I'll hunt more the more comfortable I am. Right, it's so much easier to turn back and head to the truck when uh, you're wet, you can't get dry, you can't come you know, can't bring everything back to life. It's harder to keep that positive mental attitude. So mm hmm, yeah, man, And overall versatility, Yeah, exactly. 00:23:02 Speaker 2: Yeah, superware of it. Yeah, super versatile. So we'll go through it later. I'm sure when we're like digging deeper into camping stuff. But yeah, I think that that covers a question pretty good. 00:23:15 Speaker 1: All Right, you got any new and interesting gear that's come across the Gear desk recently? 00:23:20 Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to talk about the new GoPro, the go Pro Hero eleven. I've gotten quite a few questions, like, you know, cameras and things are getting smaller and easier to like take and document your hunt and do things like that. I back the last time I used a GoPro I think was a Hero like the Hero fours and fives, I think, and I just wasn't ever a super big fan of them. Like the battery. I always had battery issues just trying to keep them charged enough. And I decided to go back to a go Pro just I actually have a digitscoping adapter on the front of it now so I can put it on my spotting scale. 00:24:00 Speaker 1: Oh cool. 00:24:01 Speaker 2: So yeah, that is from a company called times Up. 00:24:05 Speaker 3: It's the scope can adapters. 00:24:08 Speaker 1: And why did you do that instead of instead of just running your iPhone with the phone. 00:24:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, so I did both. 00:24:20 Speaker 2: And some of it is because I think I have traumatic experiences of my phone getting full on memory as I'm recording and all of a sudden. 00:24:32 Speaker 3: I can't use my phone to do that. 00:24:35 Speaker 2: And then sometimes for me it's just really nice having especially when we're filming some of these times, I do a lot of self filming stuff. So being able to put it, have it on a dedicated camera and get a memory card out of that camera and put it onto a computer. I don't know, that just seems a little bit simpler to me. But and some of it, man, it was just a new It was a new thing. I saw that you could put your GoPro on his body scope, and I'm like, I think I should try that, so well, uh, we'll see how it works. But overall, the gop it's been super cool. We took it to Hawaii and when we were snorkeling, I had it like on a little pole underwater, And these new ones you don't have to have like an underwater case like you did the old ones. They're just waterproof on their own, and yeah, like sticking it underwater and we were filming fish and stuff. I don't know, it's just super cool. They've they've they've come a long ways in the last gosh, however many years. That's been at least seven since I've since I've tried them. So yeah, the gear, the Hero eleven, it's definitely worth a look. 00:25:48 Speaker 1: Uh. I look forward to seeing the some content and shots you get from mm HM. We recently got to try out a bunch of crispy boots and I've actually been trying to the brick Stall. Am I saying that right? You've already tried that one, and then the Altitude. I've been trying both of them. Both good. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the Altitude today. Lightweight. I don't want to say it's quite I'm trying to think of what I could compare it to Oslo Fugitive, which has been a very popular boot with the hunters over the years, the ASO l O Company. Some people say a solo Oslo. They made a boot called Fugitive. Solomon has theirs that's sort of like a runner Hiker that a lot of people like. I think it's an XO X a pro three D like mid maybe seeing along those lines. It's not quite as running shoe is that boot, but it and but it doesn't have quite as stiff of a soul as that fugitive from Oslo. So I like it for that reason. Soft souls are comfy and they're quiet, but then you sort of you give up a little bit of stability and a little bit the ability to really dig into the side of a hill. Again, being near two hundred pounds size twelve foot somebody, the only ways a buck fifty sixty seventy might not put the torsional flex into that onto that boot that I do, and it's gonna happen. It's gonna feel just fine on your foot going across, you know, going side hilling. Just the last couple of hunts I've been on, I've worn them a little bit, and once I got onto side hills, I definitely felt like I was just sort of, I guess, overworking the boot and I was wishing I had a little bit more just stiffness. 00:28:00 Speaker 4: You know. 00:28:01 Speaker 1: They rate it as a two point five out of five on their website as far as stiffness of the mid soul. But again, like we talked about in that podcast that we did with Candle from Crispy, Yeah, right, the boot doesn't get stiffer as it goes up in size, which I think is something that boot manufacturers are gonna start thinking about later because obviously that same stiffness and the same boot for one hundred and fifty pound person, it's going to feel a lot stiffer than for the two hundred pound person. It's just you know, putting a lot more against that boot. But overall, I would still recommend it. Just for me, it's probably I think a lot of people. Again, lighter people could probably use it for September elk hunting in the mountains a little bit too saw for me. I like to just have a little bit more gerr in the boot, and the brick stalls very well might be the the answer to that. I haven't checked what stiffness they say about that one, but i'll cover off on that. It's a four, okay, so supposedly. Yeah, so there you go, a good bit stiffer rating from the company that makes them. But yeah, I think for spring turkey hunting, you know, hunting stuff that's you know, not mountainous country that altitude is a sweet little boot comes in at a pound and a half per boot, so definitely, you know, i'd say it's on the lighter side. There's a lot of boots out there. They're all going to come in around the vote for my size. For size twelve are going to come in around two to three pounds, So anything under two I think per boot is on the lighter side. So yeah, been happy with them. Check them out. If you're looking for something that's light, comfy, easy, sneaky. If you're going doll sheep hunting, not the boot for no. 00:30:01 Speaker 2: No. If you're playing on having a really heavy pack, yeah, probably not the boot for you either. 00:30:06 Speaker 3: Yeah. 00:30:07 Speaker 1: No. And again, if I if I knew I just had to do ten miles on a trail all the way back to the truck, maybe I was coming back for my second load of meat, I'd go heavy pack with that boot, no problem. But if I was coming off the side of a mountain, uh not, not the right boot. 00:30:24 Speaker 2: All right, Well, when we come back, we'll be talking with Clay from ex Overland about getting us unstuck. 00:30:44 Speaker 1: All right, we're back with clay Croft. Clay, how you doing today? 00:30:48 Speaker 4: I'm doing great. How are you? 00:30:50 Speaker 1: I'm doing well? Thank you? Tell us real quick before we jump into how to get riggs unstuck, But just tell me what got you into this thing? That's called overlanding. 00:31:03 Speaker 4: Well, I got into overlanding before it was really known, at least here in the US as overlanding. That kind of came later. 00:31:11 Speaker 1: So what did you call it when you when you got into this thing. 00:31:14 Speaker 4: Well, my knowledge of it at the time was where most of what we would say the industry sees it now is like car camping and remote places. 00:31:24 Speaker 1: I was. 00:31:24 Speaker 4: I was a hunter. I was a backpacker, a climber, and so I was using my truck to go far off places and stay there. And then as soon as I had kids, I wasn't able to do the long term backpacking and long term hunting trips and stuff. So I was based out of my vehicle a lot more. And that's where I always liked vehicles. I always liked building trucks, so this was a natural progression for me to start working on vehicles more. And then eventually, after a few years of doing that, I kind of looking around the off road the four x four world. I came across a magazine called over and Journal, and I was like, oh, my goodness, there's a whole magazine about this. But people travel the world by their vehicles. This is what I want to do. So that's that's when I was really introduced to the term overlanding, which takes what we do here in the US, you know, on a weekend warrior basis, to a whole new level of traveling around the world with your vehicle. 00:32:24 Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, yeah, you've got to ship a vehicle across an ocean. That's next level. 00:32:30 Speaker 4: Yeah, yep, And that's a whole lot of fun. It's a big adventure. But we learned how to do all of that by doing what we do here at home. 00:32:41 Speaker 3: Right, what vehicle did you start with? 00:32:43 Speaker 4: I started with, let's see, it was a nineteen let me see you that's a good question, two thousand and one Tacoma four door and modified it up so I could sleep in the back and go go down the road. And since an I've built almost exclusively Toyota short of a couple different trucks. 00:33:05 Speaker 1: Man, I would love to get into that topic, but I think we say say that for a for another gear Talk podcast episode, because I was noticing looking at your website that a lot of a lot of the builds are Toyotas. You guys have done a few others, but uh, it's definitely that it's owned by the Toyota. But yeah, we'll get into that another one. Let's talk about how to get trucks unstuck. I like it that you helped us build out a outline for today's podcast and you called it a vehicle immobilization, which is like a real fancy way if you like called your texted your friend and said, hey, I'm immobilized. 00:33:46 Speaker 4: Yeah, Like what do you you sound smart? 00:33:48 Speaker 1: Yeah? Are you stuck? Yes, I'm stiff. 00:33:51 Speaker 4: You are stuck? 00:33:53 Speaker 1: Yeah, but you did you did say there's two kinds and that and one is loss of traction. And that's like loss of traction seems like it's a very tidy, you know, way to call it, but it's actually within loss of traction, it's you know, that's a very broad thing, you know, basically saying you're stuck and you're stuck because your tires are not moving forward. But before we get into that, the other I guess type of mobilization is what you called systems, right, yeah, yep. 00:34:28 Speaker 4: So basically your your vehicle has life systems. It's got electricity, it's got fuel, and it's got mechanical function. Right, So you if any one of those three things breaks down, you will also be immobilized. So if your electrical system, your battery quits, or if your transmission goes out or a diff breaks or something like that, then you're essentially stuck as well. 00:34:55 Speaker 1: Yep. 00:34:55 Speaker 4: So that that topic really boils down to just making sure that to prevent being immobilized in that way, you need to have really good maintenance. Comes down to maintenance and what we call mechanical sympathy. This is something that not a lot of us were taught as kids, but like how to how to drive your car or your truck or your so that it lasts a really long time, or to make good decisions in the back country when you're going up certain routes or going down certain roads that won't jeopardize the vehicle because it's too hard on it. So you have mechanical sympathy that says, you know, I probably shouldn't do that because if I do do that, one of those systems mechanical, electrical, or fuel, by chance might fail. So I shouldn't do that in the first place. And that's going to keep you from being immobilized in that regard. And then yeah, does that make yeah? 00:35:58 Speaker 1: No, No, that's yeah. On hundred percent makes sense, And I like mechanical sympathy. That's a great, great term. I hope you guys. You guys should have a t shirt that says X. 00:36:08 Speaker 4: OVERLI can be sympathetic to your rig. Yeah. 00:36:13 Speaker 1: But yeah, before we get farther into that, let's talk about the most common yeah, which is loss of traction. 00:36:21 Speaker 4: Loss of traction. 00:36:22 Speaker 1: Yeah, and you you broke it down a bunch of different versions of loss of traction. But uh, it looks like by your list, you sort of like tires are are number one. 00:36:35 Speaker 4: Yeah. Basically, loss of traction means that you no longer have the power of the engine, can no longer turn the wheels, or it's turning the wheels too easily. I suppose you know your wheels are spinning. So loss of traction can come from your tires being gunked up, being stuck in the mud. It could be due to being high centered. How many of us have gone in somewhere and drove over something and the frame rests down on the dirt, and now the tires spin and now you're resting on the frame. It happens a lot in the back country, right, So there's where loss of traction no longer. Are your tires able to move you forward? 00:37:16 Speaker 1: Got it? 00:37:17 Speaker 4: Yeah? So that's really tires is where the problems start. One of the best things to prevent loss of traction is to it seems so basic, but have the right tire for your vehicle and the environment that you're going into. So a lot of us could. If you hopped on a highway tire and went down into the mud, you're not going to do very well. If you're going to be on a slick, greasy road in the back of eastern Montana, highway tire is going to do. Do you know favorsy guys working on a truck in the background. You can probably hear that right now. 00:37:56 Speaker 1: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit, that's all right, it's good, good, good to know you got got a busy shop going there, and I have to think they're putting tires on. Let's just jump into tires. I mean, I guess you can talk about you know, brands you like, but I mean, is it there's the whole how many plies a tire has, and then obviously the tread pattern and tread depth. I mean, when you're like, I'm trying to think how to best phrase this when you're looking at buying a new set of tires and you're like, like you just said, you got to be buying and looking to put on this stuff for the conditions you're going to find yourself in. But that being said, it seems like most of us use our truck for driving around town, driving kids to school, and going to get groceries for ninety some percent of its life. And then there's a little bit where you go get to have fun where you actually are putting the tires to use. I mean, are you using two different sets of tires for something like that? Do you have your city tires and then you have what you put on when you're going to through Montana you might encounter gumbo. 00:39:03 Speaker 4: Well, yeah, So there's a few ways to approach this, and families approach it differently, I suppose as well. So some of us only have one one vehicle that we drive, and if we only have one main vehicle, that's when having a couple sets of tires is really going to be the best bet. If you're doing ninety percent of the time you're on paved roads here in town, you're doing some highways, like a good highway tire is obviously going to be the most efficient for your lifestyle. But if you get off grid a bit, you're going down for service roads, you're poking around in the woods a bit. Maybe you could offset the benefits of the highway tire for more of an aggressive tire which would roll you into an all terrain. Does pretty great on the highway, does good around town. Still got pretty good tire whear, but it has enough aggression to and stiffness and toughness that you can rely on it in the backcountry. You know, tree is in like little Bee back country. Not we're not driving off the roads or anything like that. That's you know, it's I want to specify that when I say that this is you know, the forest service getting to the trailhead or exploring through some mountains. The altrain tire is going to be a really good tire for you. It even does pretty well in the snow. Now, if you're going to be in more environments that are really uh rocky, really sharp shale, then you kind of want to step up into a tougher tire, which you get to usually in the mud terrain style tire. Now much go. 00:40:45 Speaker 1: Ahead ahead, I'm just going to say what exactly makes a tire tough. 00:40:51 Speaker 4: Sure, So a tire is made of compounds of rubber compounds, and every tire manufacturer has their own chemistry of tire compounds. That's what kind of that's the science, that's the magic sauce between tires, you know. So like you look at a toyo and they're really stiff. They're really they got a lot of their rubbers really like solid, their blocks are really stiff. You can go to now look at like any winter tire. What makes a winter tire really good is that the compound is really soft, and then when it gets really cold, it still maintains its ability to flex even though it's sitting on extremely cold ground. 00:41:32 Speaker 1: So and that helps to have better grip. And if the rubber compound is stiffer, you lose grip and you're sliding more. 00:41:40 Speaker 4: Exactly now, your winter tires were made of softer compounds, it's gonna wear out faster. That's why you don't drive around on your winter tires all the time. 00:41:48 Speaker 1: They do really great. 00:41:49 Speaker 4: In the winter, but if you drive around on them all summer, you wouldn't have them very long. That's that's why you go to a normal you know street tire, because the compound is stiff enough that you'll get the mileage out of it and get them the bang for the buck. 00:42:04 Speaker 1: Got it. 00:42:07 Speaker 4: So the third tire typically is your mud terrain tire, and that mud terrain tire will have a stiffer compound. It's made to spin essentially, so the stiffness it's it's designed to not chunk, you know, like if you're spinning a tire, the rubbers not chipping chipping off, and it's meeting new new. 00:42:31 Speaker 1: Surface or rocks. 00:42:33 Speaker 4: It's tougher in that way, and then the gaps between the lugs are wider. And the whole reason that is that way is because a tire moves you forward by grabbing, especially in the mud and snow, by grabbing new material, and as it spins, it throws it out the back and then it allows it to grab new material on the front and keep moving forward. This is a very limited situation, like how often can you think you've been that stuck? But that's when that tire really shines when you're in loose, muddy stuff, so you can throw out out the back and grab new manterially on the front and keep you moving forward. 00:43:12 Speaker 1: Got it, and it's so it's interesting because I thought too, I didn't know that those are actually start to get harder. I actually thought that maybe they remain somewhat supple, so that that, I guess squishiness would help you grip the rocks if you got into some sort of thing where you're like actually climbing, you know, rocks or over some boulders and stuff, that that softness would help you grip. But you don't. You don't need that. You still need just tough and stiff in that situation. 00:43:41 Speaker 4: Well a little it's kind of both because when a tire's brand new and the lugs are really tall, it's a lot softer than when you get to say, like fifty percent of the tirewear. So your tire never performs the same day, the same exact way from day to day because your lug or your tirewear is being reduced. So as you know, if you've got a brand new set of mud tires and you went to Moab and wanted to go on the slick rock, it's going to do really, really well. There's a lot of flex because the lug is really tall. It's going to grip stuff and you're going to go up the trail, no problem. Now if you get down to the last, say twenty percent, you're getting into the tirewar indicators. There's just not enough flex. The rubber is still hard enough that it's a safe, reliable tire, but there's just no height anymore to give it that much more flex. That's where more siping is what it's called. The cuts and grooves into the lugs start to matter because it allows it to maintain traction and softness through the lugs life the tire lugs life. 00:44:51 Speaker 1: Interesting. 00:44:52 Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a lot too. Tires. I think of them like shoes. You know, you have hunting boots that do this. You have you may even have an the hunting boot that you know is for water, more water or cold temperatures. And then you've got you know, climbing shoes to go climbing. You know, the compounds and the way they're designed to do different things. So they really isn't one tire fits all. If there is one, it would be the all terrain. 00:45:17 Speaker 1: Tire, okay, And but there's within all terrain tires. I mean, there's this's got to at least a dozen solid tire manufacturers that make a solid all terrain. But it just they they're not all created equal, right. 00:45:31 Speaker 4: No, And they if you were to look at a lot of them, they're going to have they all have their chart right like pluses and minuses, benefits and setbacks. And if you were to really dive into what tires best for you, you'd have to spend a lot of time researching. Bottom line, most of these tires from the top manufacturers in the all terrain world come from great A Tires like Continental Michelin. So like be if Goodrich is owned by Michelin, General Tire is owned by Continental. All these top manufacturers of good good tires build get into their sub brands there b B level tires. That doesn't mean that it's a B level quality, it's just not the top ownership. 00:46:17 Speaker 1: Interesting, Yeah, so hold on, you said be of good Rich is owned by Michelin, So you're saying that the Michelin tires are you're actually going to get a better alterrain there than if you buy the be of good Rich Allterrain. 00:46:31 Speaker 4: As far as I know, I'd have to look this up, but Michelin doesn't actually make an alterrain tire that competes with BEF good Rich. They let their sub company be of good Rich make those tires, got it? Because they're different markets essentially, you know, and a lot of the Continental and the Michelin they they spend their time. And this is my assumption. I don't really know all of this for facts, but you know, they're they're in the semi world. They're in the the map production of tires where there's a lot of rubber meat in the road. Uh. And then you have your sub sub brands that are dealing with a lot of the the consumer stuff, which is us you know. 00:47:12 Speaker 1: I see. So your your assumption is that consumer brands and consumer tires don't make up the majority of their income and their business. 00:47:23 Speaker 4: Uh. I don't know on the revenue side. I do know when it comes to their who they're talking to and the volume of rubber that they're having or tires that they're having to make in size right yep. 00:47:42 Speaker 2: Interesting, So back back to like switching between a couple of different kinds of tires. So my scenario right now, I have some toy open country mpts on my pickup. Right now, we're kind of getting out of the winner and we're still going to do a little bit of spring stuff like, it's still pretty snowy and muddy up in the mountain, so I'll keep them on a little longer. But I'm starting to think about getting a new set of tires, like an AT to run through the summer and then the first part of a little bit of the fall and then switch back to the empts. Is that kind of a rotation that you would recommend, so. 00:48:17 Speaker 4: The empties, Yeah, it is a good way to go. A lot of times I do the opposite. 00:48:23 Speaker 1: I do. 00:48:24 Speaker 4: I run mud terrains from spring to through the end of fall, when you're going to see your muddiest, nastiest situations. Summer, You're going to see a lot of rock in a lot of dirt, so I want the toughness of it. And then when I go to winter, I actually go to my all terrain tire because all trains have a better They have better road matters in the winter, so they have more siping in them there. They're really a lot better in snow and on ice than a mud terrain is because a mud terrain has large blocks, a lot of contact, heavy contact patches, whereas an all train tire has a lot more siping, the smaller blocks less gap between the blocks, and it does a lot better in the winter. 00:49:14 Speaker 1: Since since you've mentioned it quite a few times and I'm familiar with siping, but I think, just like if you can't give us like the two minute version and really explain siping, because I think some people, I mean, you did say that it's the cuts in the lugs, but really go just a little bit deeper and explain siping. 00:49:32 Speaker 4: Sure, so siping. 00:49:35 Speaker 1: It is. 00:49:36 Speaker 4: It is just that is the amount of cuts that from the top of the lug down to the main part of the carcass of the tire, which allows the blocks. You know, if you think of think of an alterrain tire, it's got all these little patches of contact patches that touch the surface right, and then there's group bigger grooves in between those lugs. Well, siping will go even smaller than that. The those cuts go into those lugs individually, and that allows the lug to have flex itself versus just being a solid piece of rubber between all. 00:50:10 Speaker 1: Yeah, so how does that flex then help the tire? 00:50:14 Speaker 4: So that it does it it does two things for the tire. It helps the tire stay cooler and because there's more air between it basically allows the tire to cool off and then it helps on the micro let's see the micro traction. So all the little not grooves and bumps and roughness of the surface of the road or trail, those little teeny sipings can help grab and grip on those little things. And that's why a winter tire has tons of siping. If you go look at like a blizz Ac Michelin Blizzak tire, it is full of little zig zagged cuts into the into the tread and that's why it's so good in the winter. 00:51:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, I've heard of the siping and the and the rubber compounds of winter tires become so good that there's there's plenty of tire shops that don't even recommend getting uh the oh shoot, my lost words. Not not the cleats, but what do you call it? The uh oh the studs studs right? Are you on board with that or do you stud your winter tires? 00:51:31 Speaker 4: I am on board with that, So I just recently I studied a set of general all terrains uh there, which they're called their grabber at X's and they have done. They're really great in the winter. And then I they also still provide studs, stud holes that you can put studs into. 00:51:49 Speaker 1: Mm hmm. 00:51:49 Speaker 4: Excuse me, but uh I, I really didn't see a difference when I put the studs in versus when I didn't have them, because the being in the tire compounds are getting so good, especially on the more modern tires. In the last like five years, we've seen compounds get a lot better. Tires kind of tire companies kind of run their technology for as long as they can before they have to update it. But in the last five six seven years they've gone through another round of updating their compounds, and all of these tires are really doing a pretty dang good job in the winter, to the point that studs have become less important. Now a stud will help you in deep ice, like when it's really thick and it wants to bite, that's where stud's going to come in. Come in andy and right now, like the at they only stud the outer corners. So like when you're turning into a corner and you're trying to have you know, traction as you turn a vehicle because you have forces acting in two directions at once, then that's when the studs can bite and help make a car turn and better. 00:53:02 Speaker 1: So yeah, all right, let's uh let's get into uh we we have this note is decision tree about how to buy, when and use cases and under that we have applies which I definitely want to get your take on how implies my tires need and then that will take us into pricing. 00:53:22 Speaker 4: Sure. Well, it's kind of back to Jordan's question, like what what are I'm going into a couple of seasons? You know, the decision tree? What what do I buy? You know, what do I buy? And win? If you want to have the best winter tire, I'll just sit now. You need to buy a winter tire. Nothing beats them. It's it's a specifics like the climbing shoe for climbing. Like you can't beat a climbing shoe for climbing. 00:53:46 Speaker 1: H No, if I can't. I got a quick example of that. Our old house. We moved a couple of years ago. But our old house had one heck of a driveway. I mean the kind of a driveway where I think see people went to think about looking at the house and buying it, and the driveway scared way. I mean it was half a mile and I can't tell you what the actual grade was, but I mean when you rode your bike down it, you were riding the brakes, you know what I mean. It was. It was a steep bugger and steep enough were in the winter. When we bought the place, I had just the regular BF good Rich all terrain KO tire and that was I don't know whatever five six, seven years ago maybe, and I would have to chain up all the time, and I slid off my own driveway multiple times and just it. It wasn't great. And that was just a straight altrain tire. And my neighbor said, man, when you're ready, you know, go and try these. They're the Cooper Mud and snow I think it's a very They might have changed the name now, it might be the snow Claw now, but I think when I had my first pairs, just the Cooper Mud and snow mins is what they called it. And man, I put those things on and never had to put chains on again. I mean it it was like I went from being I don't know, the uh, what's the superhero that slides around on the ice like surfboard. I was that guy on my be of good riches, and then I went to be in Spider man. I mean those things just grip that driveway and just up and down all different kinds of snow conditions, no problem. And that's what really turned me on to snow tires. It's like wow, yeah, like forevermore, I will have snow tires. 00:55:27 Speaker 4: Especially here in Montana when you run. I mean, like this, this winter was tough. This is a long winter, and having snow tires and having the right rubber that meets the road really makes it safer. And I always encourage people to buy the right tire for the right environment because it's ultimately your whole family is at stake. It's a relatively cheap investment to have the right kind of traction where the rubber literally meets the road so that you can avoid all these really costly, potentially dangerous situations. We kind of get a little cheap with our trucks sometimes or in our cars. I don't want to spend the money on that, but like, what are we risking, you know, sliding off the ditch all the time, going into the bank, You're risking body damage or getting stuck somewhere where you shouldn't be. It quickly becomes an investment that's well worth it. When you run out the scenarios just a little ways. 00:56:22 Speaker 1: Yeah, well it falls right under that vehicle maintenance that you talked about earlier, where if you take care of that, then you're just going to have less problems when you're out there doing your adventures. 00:56:34 Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's the whole reason we're there. You know. We get to choose our adventures, and sometimes we choose our adventure through ignorance by not maintaining our things or you know, that's kind of the I mean, accidents happen, for sure, but a lot of it is preventable. So we get to choose that adventure. And I like to keep our vehicles maintained at the highest level so that I go out and have the adventure I intend to have, not the one that I ended up with. 00:57:00 Speaker 1: Right, Okay, so let's just say we're we're going down the decision tree and Jordan's like, all right, I'm gonna go with this new mud terrain tire. It's gonna be my summer and my ball haunting rig tire. She's she's what truck do you have? How big of a truck? Jordan? 00:57:24 Speaker 3: Three quarter town and twenty. 00:57:26 Speaker 1: Okay, so how many plies does she need. 00:57:29 Speaker 4: Are you towing anything? 00:57:32 Speaker 3: Yep? What are you towing of sixteen foot enclosed trailer? 00:57:36 Speaker 1: Okay? 00:57:37 Speaker 4: So yeah, so ply really has a lot to do with the sidewall stiffness. And there's three ply, which almost all tires with the new modern setup two and a half like. Okay, so let's take the all terrain tire from or from general tire. I can speak towards this one because I know the most about it. It's three ply other than where on the sidewall, so we're talking on the side of the tire. This is where deflection comes from. Okay, and this is actually integrated as part calculated, as part of your suspension system. The way your tire flexes up and down on the road correlates to how your suspension responds as well. So a three ply has three and the plies aren't necessarily what they used to be. Some of these terms come from old tire technology, but they just stuck with the same terms because that's what people knew. But like chords, for example, ten ply or ten corded tires, they used to literally be chords in the tire h It is a little different now, but they still use the term chords because the technology is better than that, but they can equate it to what the chords used to be. Is that if that makes sense? So sure? 00:58:55 Speaker 1: Anyway, when you say when you say chords like like rope. 00:59:01 Speaker 4: Yeah, they used to be like steel banding and chords. Back in the day. It was literally chords wrapped around the main carcass of the tire and gave. 00:59:12 Speaker 1: It and that would go out on the outer. 00:59:15 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:59:17 Speaker 1: Okay, so how does that affect if that's on the outside, how does that affect the the sidewall? Uh? 00:59:26 Speaker 4: So you have it doesn't Well I guess it probably does if you talk to some physicists. But there you have your side wall deflection up and down, and then you have the stiffness of the main carkness of the tire which is in your chords. And this is about the extent of where my knowledge of how a tire is built ends. So I don't want to get too far and put out any misinformation because ultimately it matters kind of but not really, Like I don't focus on this too much. I know that when I'm towing, when I asked your about what you know, how are you using? You're going to want a heavier plied tire with stiffer cordage because of the weight that you are requiring the truck to pull, and what is going to be on that rear axle because you have all this tongue weight axle weight. If you have too soft of a tire in both sidewall and cordage, it's just going to be like a it's just too soft. It's not going to hold up and it's going to wear out quickly. But the reason you don't want too heavy you of a cordage of a tire and too much sidewall if you're not toying, is because it'll ride like a wagon. 01:00:35 Speaker 1: It'll be a terrible driving experience. 01:00:37 Speaker 4: So that that's what you're kind of balancing out as you are looking to buy what tire. 01:00:45 Speaker 2: What about toughness in general with higher plies, Like I don't know, ranch life, we always went with a ten ply because we've always said, like nails don't go through. 01:00:56 Speaker 1: It is easy. 01:00:57 Speaker 4: It's true, it's true. It's just there's more matisial on the on the tread right there underneath it. So you have your lugs on top and then you have the cordage underneath and there's just a lot more there. They're just it's a stronger, stiffer tire. It doesn't allow things through it. Excuse me, but that excuse me goodness. That works well on ranch trucks because you're often towing. You're you're really utilizing those trucks for ranch work, so you're willing to give up comprove the comfort of a lesser ply tire with lesser side, lesser sidewalls, that is more supple and goes down the road a lot nicer. If you hop into a RAM thirty five hundred with a ten ply and three three ply sidewalls, go drive down the highway and then hop into a twenty five hundred that has eight ply cordage and only like a two and a half sidewall, you will notice the difference. You won't feel all the final little vibrations, all the all the little cracks in the road that you would with a with a heavier, stronger tire. So just because it's tougher doesn't mean it's really the one you want because you have to live with it every day, But it might serve the purpose of its use case, got it? Yeah? 01:02:22 Speaker 1: Okay, So she decided on the she she's gonna go. Uh, I don't know, eight pliz or whatever. Sure, how much is? It seems like they got a lot more expensive, and they got more expensive when the rims got bigger the tire it seems like there's less rubber that you're buying out, but somehow the tires got more expensive. So talk about just general pricing, I guess. And then also uh like with with brand names, like how like are you paying more because it's the Nike of tires. 01:02:56 Speaker 4: Great questions, So let's let's talk about brand first. Just knock that out. Your top brands. They are running the latest rubber compounds, the newest technology because they are competing for the top slot when you get into your subtires. A lot of them are made in China. They're running off of technology that is twenty plus years old, but it still works and that's what makes them cheaper. So, yeah, you are buying a little bit of brand name, I suppose, But they are aggressively competing with each other and their warranties and their tirewear and all the forums in the world out there, you know, everyone talking about it. So the top brands really do provide the best tire I don't think you're paying too much for any one name over the other to some degree. We'll let the internet debate that forever. But so and then what was it? What was the other question? The others half of that? 01:04:05 Speaker 1: I guess it's just general pricing. But it sounds like if they're all competing, then really the pricing is not going to differ that much, right. 01:04:14 Speaker 4: Yeah, So now it comes down. You were talking about wheel size, rim size, so we have you know, standard used to be fifteen inch rims. You know, every truck had a fifteen inch rim for a long long time, so they made thousand, millions and millions of tires at fifteen inch rims. So this is getting into economies of scale, is best I know of how all they price this. So when you get into a twenty two inch rim and you want a thirty five inch tire on a twenty two inch rim, there are very few of those wheels and entire combinations out there, and so therefore the economies of scale say they have to charge more for it because they're not selling so many of them. That's what makes them more expensive. That's on the extreme side. Nowadays, the common wheel size is now to seventeen inch wheels and eighteens. You're seeing other OEM's original equipment manufacturers like Toyota for and all these you'll see twenties coming out. That's usually for lucks. Usually it's seventeen to eighteen inch wheels because the brakes have gotten bigger. Back in the day, are fifteen inch wheels accommodated fifteen inch sized brakes, you know, the littler trucks and the technology. Now we're getting into heavy tow packages, towing more, pulling more, hauling more, and that all requires much more stopping power. So therefore the brakes got bigger and the wheels got more tall or rounder, so it can stuff a bigger break in there. So those seventeens and eighteens are a lot more commonplace now and then just like anything else. Right now, we've seen a lot of rice increase due to supplying demand and manufacturing the ability to get the materials and the cost of the materials. You know, tires are made of oil. Oil has been pretty high for the last year and a half, so you know, just the the base material of that is starting at a higher price point. So everything floats with economics. 01:06:25 Speaker 1: So what's Jordan going to be looking at to be paying a first setate for average to get herself a nice quality tire that she can depend on. 01:06:36 Speaker 4: Man, I think right now you're seeing anywhere between. What depends on do you know your wheel size? I'll bet it's eighteen's it's eighteen, Yeah, I guess on the thirty five hundred, seventeen or eighteen, you're going to be looking at two hundred and seventy five to three hundred and seventy five dollars a tire, just depending. 01:06:58 Speaker 3: On they really they really went up. 01:07:01 Speaker 4: They really did. There is even a rubber or a tire shortage that occurred in last year across manufacturers, so that also drove prices up. We've seen a reduction in the different sizes offered, because, for example, if you have a seventeen inch thirty five inch tire, but the most common size is a seventeen inch wheel in a thirty two inch tire, they're going to reduce the thirty five inch tires because it takes a whole lot more rubber to make one of those than it does to make a thirty two inch tire, and that's the one they're selling the most of so they are reducing some of these bigger tire sizes so that they can meet the demand of the more common sizes. So we've seen all kinds of stuff, and that's why prices are up. Availability is down on certain things. So if you find the right tire size and it's a decent price right now at least where we are today in time, probably buy it, you know, because it's there. So yeah, And so if you're going to be changing your tire size for any reason, make sure you buy that fifth tire, because you don't want to have a thirty five inch tire or a thirty three inch tire on all four. And then your spare tire is a thirty two That might get you home off the trail a little ways, but you would not want to go down the highway with that offset and your tires. You will burn some stuff up, you'll wreck you'll wreck some trucks. So make sure that if you're increasing your tire size that you do it all five. 01:08:39 Speaker 1: That's a hot temp rate there, all right. Anything else under the subject of tires that we missed, or you feel like we need to just touch on before we move. 01:08:50 Speaker 4: On, if you're still just really wondering what is the best tire for me, take a hard look at the all train tire because it does everything pretty dang well. Does it do everything perfectly? No, but that's why it's an all terrain tire. And they're they're fantastic, and they work great for hunters, they work great for the ranch truck, and they work great for getting around town and and the winners. So are my personal vehicles. Run an all terrain tire on our lan Cruiser year round and it's it's the good, perfect tire. I can do everything with it. If you're wanting more specifics into the winter tire, that's obvious. Or if you want more aggressive toughness, spend the extra go into a mud terrain and but it's going to have its limited uses when it works the best. You know, all terrain is really the way to go if you're just wondering what to get. 01:10:07 Speaker 1: Okay, so we've got we've got tires covered. I'm trying to think how we should tackle the next part. So does does that count? That that kind of counts as as we originally started this conversation with saying, hey, what's your top five vehicle recovery items like what are the things you need? Good tires counts as one of those five recovery items, correct. 01:10:33 Speaker 4: Yeah, start you should start with it, got it you? Okay, So that trickles down from there. 01:10:40 Speaker 1: Exactly, so you might not even need to you know, you don't have to use the word stuck or immobilize if you start off with good tires. Yeah. 01:10:50 Speaker 4: Yeah, hopefully it get you where you need to go. And uh, because it's the right size, the right tire, the right pattern for the environment that you're operating in. But then other things happen, right, we still exceed the traction of a tire, we exceed the clearance of a vehicle. Things happen, and that's where we need to be prepared in our immobilization first aid kid, so to speak. From there. 01:11:17 Speaker 1: Okay, and so we'll get into each one. But the rest of the items that you had on your list were air compressor, recovery boards also known as traction boards, a jack of some sort, and then a strap. 01:11:33 Speaker 4: Yep, yeah, these are all critical. The reason air compressor is like the first one we put on there is because that is typically the first thing that fails. While we do have good tires, it is where the rubber meets the road, and that's where we see the most failures in a vehicle is in tires. So having the ability to fix a tire is pretty critical. So having some plugs and an air compressor, whether it's one that you can plug into your battery or that's one full time built into your truck like a lot of overland vehicles have, that allows you to fix a flat and keep moving without having to take the tire off the vehicle. It'll get you off the trail, get you going, and in that in my opinion, is much safer in many ways because you're not having to lift the vehicle take things off in the back country where other further accidents could happen, allows you to repair the tire right there and keep moving. 01:12:27 Speaker 2: And what's what's the cadillac of air compressors right now that are not in your vehicle. 01:12:35 Speaker 4: Vy air is a really good one. And then ARB out of Australia makes there the same compressor that they put inside vehicles, they put in a box for a portable version and that's what we run. 01:12:49 Speaker 1: Okay, So really the air compressor is kind of a two part deal. You need an air compressor and then you need some plugs and plugs. If you never done it, I haven't. I haven't done it myself maybe a half dozen times. But they're really quite simple. Yeah, it's not hard. It's something you can you can watch one YouTube video on it and know how to do it. And now you're equipped in the back country to solve your probably your number one problem, which is a flat right. I mean you literally with a with a small little I don't know what the tool is called, but you literally stick it into the hole with some adhesive and then when you pull it out, the plug stays, the tool comes out, the plug stays, and then I don't know, is there even a cure time or do you just go ahead and just and just start putting air in. 01:13:35 Speaker 4: You start putting air in it, and that is the next trick. You put air in it, see if it holds, and if it's still leaking, you put another plug in right next to it. You know, you just keep jamming plugs in there until it stops leaking. My experiences, it's usually one, maybe two, but it's usually one. I had an extreme case in Greenland with an arctic truck tire where we play twenty into one, but I was twenty into a gash. Yeah, and it was a special plug system that has They were blue and they had this emulsifier. I think that's the term for it. That when they all get next to each other, they bond and build and then they adhere to the rubber of the tire and built a patch. Essentially, we built a massive plug. But that was running a forty four inch tire built for running at two pounds of pressure. 01:14:32 Speaker 1: And what caused the a gash that big? We ran over a rock in Greenland. Yeah, that was sticking a sharp rock YEP, and gashed it. But we're running at two pounds of pressure two psi. Which gets me into another topic on how to run that. 01:14:52 Speaker 4: If we'd like to talk that airing down that that's a topic we should talk about. 01:14:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, because if you have an air copressor, then I guess that opens up the ability to do this right. 01:15:03 Speaker 4: Yep, And airing down is a very good technique if you I didn't learn about this until I got into the off road scene, Like I didn't learn about it from ranching when I was growing up, or my dad who is a semi truck driver ran tires and all kinds. They don't air down. They run an exact psi all the time and then they just leave it right. Well, if you have the ability to air down, you can really dramatically change how your tire performs so you can get better ride quality. But say you drive around at forty psi on the highway and daily life. 01:15:37 Speaker 1: That's pretty calm on a dirt road. What's that? Fortysi is pretty common right in a chuck tire. 01:15:44 Speaker 4: Yeah, probably thirty five to fifty psi is kind of the ranges of what truck tires run at. Just depends and a little bit of personal preference in there too, So yeah, you get a like my ram, I run fifty psi on my tires as soon as I get on a trail, or I was just down in Utah as soon as I got off the trail off the highway there running at fifty PSI just wants to shake your teeth out, you know, so you air down. We have tools for that, you know, you can use the dirt bag version is the rock on the side of the road. You air it down and you check it with your tire pressure. I went down to my truck's pretty heavy, so it's I just went down to thirty PSI, which gave me the deflection and the tire that I was looking for. There's no magic number to what you should air down to because it's really based on the deflection of the tire and how heavy your vehicle is. 01:16:33 Speaker 1: And when you say deflection of tire, yeah, explain that sure. So as you take air out of the tire, your tire is going to change its shape, especially at the contact patch of the ground. Most people think it gets wider, It doesn't. It gets longer like a snowshoe. 01:16:51 Speaker 4: So eighty percent of the length is in its or of the increase in traction patch is in its length. It gets longer. Twenty percent only folds to the sides as it comes down. And that's why when you look at an all terrain and a mud terrain tire, they have a really aggressive side wall right there at the top because when it airs down, that sidewall starts to make contact with the ground. And that's why their three ply right there because it needs to be strong enough to take to go along rocks and things like that without puncture. So yeah, if you increase that traction patch, now you have more rubber on the ground in a lot of ways that it will increase your flotation, So if you're in really deep stuff, it'll help you stay on top, and it'll also give you a much better ride. So the other day when I went from fifty psi to thirty psi and it was like cushy, you know, it's like I was riding on a cloud, you know. And that saves the rest of the vehicle from all the vibrations that start at the ground and go up into the into the truck. Everything's not shaken apart, and you're maintaining having mechanical sympathy for your vehicle by airing down. Now you need to make sure that you air back up before you hit the highways because an air down tire generates a lot of rolling resistance, which creates heat. So if your tire is too far, too low, just imagine running around town on a really low tire, it's going to destroy it due to heat. So you air it back up and off you go. 01:18:31 Speaker 1: And the heat is only caused because there's just more contact. 01:18:35 Speaker 4: More contact and deflection. So as a tire rolls, say like at the top of the tire, it looks normal, right, but then as you look at the bottom of the tire where the weight is squishing it. It's all deformed right there. So that action of cycling through those two forms over and over and over and over and over again generates tons of heat. And if you've ever had a flat tire where going down the road, all of a sudden you blow a tire and then by the time you come to a stop, that sucker is almost so hot you can't touch it. It's because of that, all of a sudden, it was going through tons of deformation and built extreme heat right off the bat. So it's a thing you need to be aired up, which brings us back to having an air compressor gives you options. You can repair a tire and you can air down, get the ride right, the proper ride that you need and traction, and then you can air back up when you hit the highway and head home. 01:19:37 Speaker 1: Okay, do you want to get into right now how that could help you get unstuck or should we kind of roll through all the pieces of the of getting unstuck and then and then work into how to actually use them. 01:19:52 Speaker 4: Sure, I'll touch on it real quick, because airing down does increase your ability to get out of many stuck situations. For so a lot of times, say you've got a tire that's slipping or two if even just airing down a little bit, which allows more contact patch to touch the ground, it also allows the tire to deflect more because it is deforming. As it goes around, it'll grab new material, but then as it's coming out of where the material is, it flexes more and releases that material. So it does help you clean the tread by being a bit aired down because of it's moving more and it helps fling the stuff out. That makes sense, and then you have more contact patch with the ground and gives you better traction to get out. Now, if you're high centered, this isn't going to help you right because your wheels aren't just touching the ground anyway, you're gonna have to put something under it. But in other situations like snow, sand, mud, being aired down is very beneficial to your traction. 01:20:54 Speaker 1: Okay, so I had a thing this winter. We're actually just taking out the trash we have to dump our own trash and dumpsters, and it hadn't been plowed and it was I don't know, a solid foot maybe a little bit more. Someone had driven in there and made it out. I went plowing in there, thinking if they made it out, so will I. Well, I get in there, and all of a sudden, all four wheels are spinning and we're moving sideways, and it was just a matter of time until we were immobilized. Do you think there was a chance that I could have gone from forty to fifteen and climb my way out of there or was that too much to ask for just airing down? 01:21:33 Speaker 4: Probably too much to ask in that situation, because what was causing you to not be able to get out? Was it the height of the ruts? 01:21:43 Speaker 1: I'm guessing it was just the amount of snow, right, Like I could never get down to something that I could actually grab. Gotcha, Well, I mean I chained up and I drove right out of there, So. 01:21:54 Speaker 4: Sure, okay, So it wasn't a clearance problem. It was a flotation problem. So yeah, it probably would have knowing what I heard there going down. So as you air down, think of it. It's an exponential curve. It's not like if I go to from forty pounds to twenty pounds and from twenty pounds to ten pounds, is the same amount of floatation increase? No, you'll gain some from forty to twenty, but from twenty to ten is like, I don't know, meatball math four times as much. 01:22:30 Speaker 3: Wow. 01:22:31 Speaker 4: So getting into those sweet spots where you actually really do start to see a lot of increase in your traction and your floatation happens down there in the lower pressures, and it happens very quickly. So you might only need to go from twenty pounds to eighteen pounds and that's enough, or if you need a little bit more, only go to fifteen pounds and you've actually increased it by quite a lot. This all depends on the way to the vehicle, on the truck and the tire, and it just takes some experimenting with your own vehicle to figure it out. But it might have It might have given you the floatation that you needed. 01:23:05 Speaker 1: Huh. 01:23:06 Speaker 4: So interesting ranchers, Back to quick tire size here, a lot of ranchers like pizza cutters. You've heard the term pizza cutters. I want a tall, skinny tire. Yeah, that's because a tall, skinny tire does benefit you more often than a big wide tire. Airing down a tire getting flotation only starts to benefit you past one hundred and ten percent of your vehicle's clearance. We can get real techy here. So you only want a wider, longer, taller tire when you've exceeded one hundred and ten percent of your clearance of the vehicle, at least in snow, sand and mud, because you're dragging the vehicle underneath, right, So now you need flotation to get up above it until then A taller, skinny tire has more contact pressure. So think of a railcar, a railroad car. All of that weight is sitting on one inch on the rail and it has all the traction it needs because it has all that downforce on a very small contact patch on the rail. So that's how our locomotive can go down on steel wheels because of the weight on a very small piece of rail. Okay, now we don't want that in our cars because it would be terrible to drive. Right, they're on rails. They can do that, they can get away with it. So we have other factors that we have to deal with, but the principle remains. So you only want a wider tire, taller tire when you need that floatation past one hundred and ten percent of your clearance. It takes a second to think about, but because you kind of got to visualize it in your head. 01:24:51 Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, so it's it's basically, once you're clear, you've exceeded clearance, right like you got it? Your yourself into a spot where. But again, this wouldn't apply to being high centered, would it, Because if you're taking air out, you're only going to get more high centered. Correct, So this would be clearance in mud snow type conditions, correct, got it? 01:25:18 Speaker 4: Where if you don't want to get high centered a lot, then you get into taller tires because it just keeps you above a lot of the things that would cause you to be high centered. 01:25:28 Speaker 1: Got it. But if I was in my situation, I was digging down too far and I was probably getting bogged down by all the other snow around me. Right my vehicle, the frame itself is starting to just push against snow and the tires can't push me through that. You're saying that I possibly could have aired down, gotten more flotation and it would have just lifted me up above that level and I could have drove it driven out exactly. Wow, I'm getting educated, are you, Jordan? 01:26:03 Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, big time. 01:26:05 Speaker 2: So with that, but that wouldn't really work if like, Okay, this last spring, I was out shooting content and I went to turn around in a poll out on a four service road and there was like a bunch of snow that had been packed in and melted and went to ice and YadA YadA, and I basically was just I wasn't stuck under the frame at all. I was just stuck on my wheels. I guess it's just ice. It was just spinning on its Yeah, there wasn't really ruts. It was just I was trying to break through some snow, but it was so hard that it just stopped me. And then when I tried to back up, it was so slick underneath that I just couldn't get any attraction backing up. That's where I think like traction boards would have been real nice, but airing down my tires in that situation wouldn't. 01:26:53 Speaker 4: It may have. Maybe it's tough because now we're getting into like specific conditions, but it would have been one of the tools in your toolkit that you could have used, especially if you didn't have traction boards or things like that. That would be one of the first things you do and you go incrementally, right, you just air down a little bit more. Does that help? Oh, let's go a little bit more. And then you get to a point where you're like, yeah, maybe I shouldn't go any further lower in my tire pressure. This isn't working. But you might have found a delta point in there where that tire pressure may have helped you in that situation. 01:27:26 Speaker 1: Is there a point where it can get dangerous or bad? Like, is there a low end where you're like, hey, if you're running the average truck and you're running forty psi normally, like I would recommend don't go below this number. 01:27:40 Speaker 4: Yeah, tire manufacturers have their number. I think general tire is like twenty two psi. They don't want you to run below twenty two psi on the trail. Below that you're becoming a test pilot for those tires to see what they're capable of. They wan't warranty them if you ran them, you know. But you know me personally, I do run pressures below twenty two pounds, but it's usually in shorter distances, like we would call this emergency pressures. So there's because we know that going from like twenty two pounds to say, fifteen psi. There's an exponential increase in flotation between those two numbers because the tire starts to deflect a lot more between those pressures, which also we know creates heat and all that stuff. But if you're running slow and you're not doing high speeds, you can maintain that you can take take care of the tire when it gets really low, like real emergency pressures, I would say, well, and again it depends on the weight of your vehicle. Like if my Ram thirty five hundred with a camper on the back and everything was down at fourteen psi, I'll bet that rim would nearly be touching the ground, you know. But if you take a Tacoma with nothing in the back, straight off the lot going down to fourteen psi, you're going to be like, is that is that tire aired down? I can't tell, you know, you know, it's just because it's due to weight and tire size and all these things. Right, So you're really looking at the deflection how the tire is behaving under the pressure that you've given it, and you can tell as soon as you get low enough where you can start to see the tire roll in a corner. That's when it's getting dangerous that you will roll the bead. So a tire is mounted to the wheel with the bead, it's kind of kind of glued in there and pressed against the bead or the rim of the tire with pressure. If you exceed the forces that it can hold, it will peel it off the rim and instantly lose all your air and you'll be on the ground. And you're now getting into a reseat the bead situation, which is very doable, but it takes work, and you've got to have the right tools. 01:29:55 Speaker 1: That's gonna say. And those tools aren't in our top five item list, right. 01:29:59 Speaker 4: No, we could throw that in there. Actually, uh, we have a recovery strap in here, a max tracks recovery. We could just throw in there a ratchet strap, a two inch ratchet strap, really bomber ratchet trap, because that's what you would need, and an air compressor to reseat the bead. So you put the strap around the middle of it, yep, and you just ratchet it down, ratchet it down, ratchet it down as tight as you can, and you basically you're squeezing the inside of the tire on the rim as much as you can, which is causing the edges, the the bead of the tire to want to pop out because you're squishing the middle and you just ratchet it down as tight as you can. That's why you need a really good one because it's going to take a lot of effort. If you have those ten plaid tires, this is gonna you're gonna be sweating. It's gonna be a lot of effort. Yeah, So you get that as best you can, and then you hit that with a shot of air and help that punch out and reseat the bead, put some more air in with your air compressor, and then you can release the ratchet strap and air up the rest of the way. There are other meta kids out there that are far more dangerous that you've probably seen all over the internet, where you shoot a bunch of ether in there and light a match and see what happens. We do not recommend you do that unless you really know what you're doing, so we'll just leave it at that. 01:31:18 Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, all right. So next on our list of recovery items top five here for Clay is recovery boards. 01:31:30 Speaker 4: Yeah, hands down, hands down, And this is above a winch, because a winch takes skill sets, so very you got to have the right tools. You should probably have a little bit of training. You got to know what to do, You've got to be in the right environment. So that's why I met a max track or a recovery board. Traction boards, however, whatever you want to call it, comes into play because anybody can use them. They're extremely safe, they weigh nothing. Then you throw them in the back of the truck and you're just there. They're waiting for you when you need them, and they help in a lot of ways. So Jordan, back to your situation where you d yeh been kind of sunk down. You got broken through the crust on the top and it was super soft underneath, and you just couldn't get the momentum again to get going right. Because your immobilization falls down to two things. You either need traction or momentum. Because if you have a lot of momentum, you cannot have a lot of traction and get through stuff right. You can just plow your way through it. If you don't have traction, you can't get momentum. So this is where recovery boards come into play. You put them, you give the tire the appropriate runway to get momentum back. So you put them under your tire, you kick them in. In your case, in the snow, you would kick them in as far as you can, doesn't matter what traction board you use. You do not want to spin the tires on the traction board because it generates excessive heat very quickly. And alike on max tracks, it says molded right into the traction board, it says no wheel spin. So you kick them in as far as you can. You've probably aired down a little bit so your tire has better grip already. 01:33:17 Speaker 1: And quick questions do you need to do you need to do any shoveling like beforehand? 01:33:24 Speaker 4: Oftentimes yes, and these work great as their own shovel. You flip them over and you just use them to dig themselves. So what you're wanting is the best approach angle or departure angle from the tire to wherever you have to get up on top of. You don't want it to be extremely steep. You know, you want it to be the lowest angle possible because that's going to increase your chances of success. So get that kicked in there, shovel out the stuff that you got to shovel out and then get them pushed in there, go to four wheel drive, and then either drive forward or drive backwards, depending on your situation. That's another benefit of traction boards because they work in both directions, whereas a winch does work primarily in one unless you have extremely good skill sets and lots of stuff to make it go in reverse. So traction boards they weigh nothing, they're cheaper than a wench, they require no electricity or hookups or and they get you out of most things. 01:34:30 Speaker 3: And you like these Max tracks. 01:34:32 Speaker 4: Max Tracks, they're the original. The owner is a good friend of mine. I'll always preach for Max Tracks. Their compounds are the best. They're single point injection molded. There's a reason they cost more. They hold up far better in the cold. 01:34:45 Speaker 3: Yeah, but what do you think about the Mini ones? 01:34:48 Speaker 4: I have a set of the Mini Ones, and I actually have friends that are traveling around the world and a tundra with a camper on the back, and they chose the minis just to save weight and they are getting around the world world on the minis. Yeah, so they're pretty cool. They're made for side by sides and stuff, but people are finding more uses for them than just that. 01:35:09 Speaker 1: I'd say, what are they roughly three feet long? The regular sized one? Yeah? Yeah, Which is there an instance where you would use them sort of? I don't know, as steps to get out of a longer problem where where Okay, you got really stuck. You put your traction boards in, you were able to move forward three feet, but then as soon as you rolled off the traction boards, you're stuck again again. Just pull them out, reset them forward to your tires and just keep moving forward like that three feet at a time. Is there or any other tips that you would do? 01:35:44 Speaker 4: Then the beauty is to have your buddies have a set as well. You didn't have four, now you have eight, and you can literally build a road and get out. We have done that. We did it in British Columbia several years ten years ago now, but we were using winches and max tracks at the same time because we were so epically stuck and we just built the Egyptian road one in front of the other, one in front of the other for a mile and we got oute forever. 01:36:15 Speaker 1: What kind of conditions? 01:36:18 Speaker 4: Now we were in British Columbia, let's he was in February, and we were just driving down some of their backcountry roads and we got hit with a massive snowstorm in the middle of that trip, and the road that we had to go down to get out had not been traveled yet, so we were just buried. So we used all the tools at our disposal through some of the worst patches, which involved like eight or twelve max tracks and winches. 01:36:48 Speaker 1: Okay, and you said instead of having four, you'd have eight if your buddy had a set, which means that you're carrying four on it, because I think I just got a set for my birthday, but I'm pretty sure I was only given two. So do you recommend carrying four of these things if. 01:37:05 Speaker 4: You're in snow? 01:37:08 Speaker 1: Four is? 01:37:08 Speaker 4: Really it gives you so many more options. Probably fifty sixty percent of the time you can get out with only two. But having a set of four is really the magic number, got it? Because that allows all four tires that have traction with a four wheel drive to find traction and push and extract, versus relying on only two tires to hopefully have enough traction to get you out. You know, And when we're talking about big hunting rigs and heavy stuff. 01:37:41 Speaker 1: Four is good. 01:37:42 Speaker 4: So your next birthday or Father's Day coming up for something, maybe a couple more. 01:37:48 Speaker 1: I'll ask for two more. 01:37:49 Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, Well next you have like a high lift jack or a hydraulic jack. 01:37:56 Speaker 3: Is that just to change your tire or you use that for more things? 01:38:01 Speaker 4: Well, a high lift jack can be used for more than just changing a tire. They be They can push and pull, so you can spread things apart with them, or you can lift things up. So they are a very handy tool. That's why farmers and ranchers make sure they're in the back of each truck. Because they can build fence with them. They can winch things closer together with them. They can lift a lot of stuff, they can pull things out. High lifts are very multi they're the multi tool of a off road vehicle. But they do come with risk. You need to really know what you're doing. You need to a lot of people have gotten hurt by them. You know. The rule of thumb is always wear gloves, have WD forty. If your high left jack isn't working, it's probably because it needs lubrication. So you always if you have a high left jack, you need to have a little bottle of WD forty taped to that thing, you know, and so you can lubricate it to get the springs and the pins working correctly. Uh. And then you never when you're operating it. You never put your face over the bar as you're lifting something, because if it slips all that way to the vehicle, is going to fling that bar back up. And a lot of people have lost some teeth and been pretty hurt by those things. So I just need to know what you're doing. Still one of the best staples out there, that's why we have on this list. I hydraulic jack. There's a couple of companies out there that make these now. Eagle makes one and ARB And it's a hydraulic piston. So you you has a handle that you hydraulically lift something and you can use a valve to lower it much safer, but it has limited use. It can't multi purpose. Is a high lift, but they're much safer and that's actually what we carry now in our vehicles. 01:39:49 Speaker 2: Nice that's what I have too, like a high it's a it's a big I think it's a big red. I'm not sure who makes that, but it's like a big red hydraulic jack. I think it's a two ton maybe yeah. 01:40:00 Speaker 4: Yep, perfect, And you want to try to have two times the weight of the vehicle on your jack to be as safe as possible. Of course there's safety margins above that, but unless you know exactly who's built, they always have at least two times the weight. 01:40:15 Speaker 1: Yeah, to be so. But in the case of getting unstuck, how would you use these jacks in a would you ever use it and just I'm stuck in deep snow or I got stuck in a mud hole situation, or where does it come into play in recovery? 01:40:32 Speaker 4: Yeah? Absolutely, So your high lift or your high centered situation, you got to lift the frame up and then so what you can do is you can lift the vehicle up and then block underneath the tires and then drive off of it. Versus trying to chip out whatever you're high centered on. You actually just physically lift the vehicle and fill the hole. Maybe you've dug your tire spun and you sunk the the truck onto whatever you're high centered on, lift the vehicle, fill in the hole with whatever material is around, rocks, more sand, tree branches, whatever you got to do, right, and then you set the vehicle back down and drive off. 01:41:14 Speaker 1: So yeah, got it. 01:41:15 Speaker 4: And if you have to swap a tire, perhaps your tires so badly damage that you can't repair it with a plug, then you will need one of these tools to make a safe tire swap it in the back country. 01:41:28 Speaker 1: And the reason you won't be able to use just the jack that the truck came with is. 01:41:34 Speaker 4: Well, hopefully you can because it's still the best option. It just but the jack that your vehicle came with is very limited in its reach, so it's built for the stock's tire size and on flat ground and the concrete in the shop, so you either need to be able to lift the jack up with a block of wood. American Expedition vehicles may an awesome stand that takes your factory jack and lifts it up and supports it. So when you put a taller tire on, now you've lifted the vehicle right, that allows your factory jack to still lift the vehicle, so you and then there's situations when a factory jack just won't work. So let's take your high centered in the snow, getting a jack under there under the you know, digging out the snow, trying to get a jack to work under an axle when you're high centered, versus getting a high lift jack out being able to of course, you need the proper mounting position on the vehicle that won't damage it rear bumper, side rails or using a tire lift with the high lift jack. But that allows I mean, you have sixty inches of lifting capability versus maybe the thirteen inches or well or so tops of a factory jack. 01:43:04 Speaker 1: Got it. Yeah, okay, so it sounds like we could do a whole other podcast just on you. 01:43:08 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:43:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, high lift jacks. 01:43:10 Speaker 4: The short story there is carry both, okay, because if you can use the smaller one, it's it's safer, it's more calculated. We use them all the time. But when you need a high left jack, you need a high left jack. 01:43:22 Speaker 3: Mm hmm. 01:43:24 Speaker 1: Yeah nice. Okay. 01:43:25 Speaker 3: What about recovery straps? 01:43:27 Speaker 4: Now, well, this is this is a simple one. If you are with a buddy or someone comes along, uh, extracting somebody with a recovery strap is going to probably be your quickest solution. Someone that can come up behind you who still has traction, hook a strap up to you and pull you backwards. Now, I must say that This is a recovery strap, not a toe strap. A toe strap has uh is a static line, has very little flex. It's designed to toe with constant force. You know, get your truck to the shop and that's. 01:44:09 Speaker 1: That's what you buy normally. If you just go down to O'Reilly and you buy one of those straps, you're gonna be buying a toe strap, right. 01:44:15 Speaker 4: Yeah, And anymore they offer both right there. The recovery strap has become very popular, Like go down to O'Reilly or Murdocks. There's gonna be a toe strap on one side, and then there's gonna be a recovery strap on the other. And a recovery strap is dynamic, so it stretches and that helps take the load of when you back up, it expands like a rubber band, and then it loads the energy into the strap and lifts and pulls the other vehicle out versus just slamming it like if it was a steel cable. You know, that's really hard on stuff. Back to that mechanical sympathy, and because I'm thinking of it right now, never ever ever recover anyone from a toeball of a hitch. 01:45:05 Speaker 1: I guarantee you seventy the people listening, they are like, oh, I did that. One did that? I know I have. 01:45:12 Speaker 4: So a toe ball is designed to take static load straight down from a trailer yea tongue weight. It is not designed to take the im massive energy load from the side they shear. And now what you've done is effectively made a slingshot. So you've slapped your toe strap. That is dynamic, it stretches, you throw it over the toe ball, your buddy backs up and that towball shears and it's wrapped in your toe strap and it flings it through the windshield of the recovery vehicle. And just a couple of years ago, a family, a dad was killed with his family in the car doing this thing, this very thing, So it. 01:45:59 Speaker 2: Is everybody that was killed killed doing the same thing. Got stuck in the ditch and they they were trying to pull him backwards and they hit the end of it and it broke. The ball off, went through his through the topper, through both windows of the topper back window of the pickup, and hit him in the back of the head and killed him. 01:46:18 Speaker 1: Wow. 01:46:20 Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that's enough right there, guys, Like, if you're listening out there and you see this happening on the trail, you need to stop someone from doing it. Holy and now yeah, the uh, the solution is take the hitch out and put the pin in it. Just thread it through the hitch and then use the pin because the pin is designed to take that load, not the hitchball. 01:46:45 Speaker 1: Okay, because those those toes straps or recovery straps have But so are you saying don't ever use a toe strap in this situation always or or or or can you sometimes get away with it? 01:46:59 Speaker 4: Well, if you're stuck, you're stuck. You got to use the tools at hand. But if you have your option, you will not use a toe strap. If you do have to use a toe strap, you will find you will take it to tension. You will never shockload it right. So you can, if all you have is a toe strap, hook it up to both vehicles, back the one up until there is proper tension slowly you know there's tension on the line, and then you use it in a static line, just backing up smooth, don't let it go to slack, and then load because the strap's not going to stretch something. Whatever is the weakest link will break first, whether it's a bumper getting ripped off a truck or the trap the strap braking. You just don't know. 01:47:47 Speaker 1: And the recovery straps do they come with pre formed loops at the ends, just like a toe strap. They do, yep, okay. And so you would just take your pin out and then kind of shove that loop into the I guess the receiver in there, and then run the pin back in And that's how you would That's that's you're saying, that's a viable way to attach the strap to the to the vehicle. 01:48:12 Speaker 4: That would be the minimalistic worst case scenario, how you would hook that up. The best case scenario is that you carry a hitch recovery system. It's just another hitch that you put in there that you were allowed to put a clevice into it where you hook the strap to the clevis and that clevis attaches to the receiver and use all the strength of the towbar through that and it's still relying on the pin, but it's much more efficient. There's no sharp edges, and they're very affordable. They're you know, forty fifty bucks for one of those. I have mine sitting in the back. It slides into the receiver. It replaces the ball and then it just has an end on it that you can put a d ring. A lot of people call them d rings, but it's a clevis. You put a clevis in there. A bow shackle is technically its name. Put the bow shackle through the strap into the hitch there and off you go. You you are safe. 01:49:27 Speaker 2: I have another example of what not to do Y when I was when I was I don't know, I was in high school. 01:49:34 Speaker 3: I think. 01:49:36 Speaker 2: We were doing stuff with the tractor. I got the tractor stuck. My dad went to pull me out. Well, dealing with what you have, we have. We have a giant recovery rope. It's like that that big you know, just like a huge one for the tractor or whatever. We didn't have our d ring, so we had a piece of chain that we chained around. So what we did was we hit the end of that, the chain broke. The whole thing's loaded, comes back at me and goes through the windshield of the tractor. And what probably saved me was it hit the front of the hood of the tractor first and then bounced up into the windshield, so it didn't come all the way through the windshield at me. But another example of like, don't do that. It could have been Yeah, I could have been pretty badly hurting. That scared both of us. 01:50:26 Speaker 4: And uh, you're lucky to be that's you're lucky to be on this podcast. 01:50:31 Speaker 3: No, I know, yeah, I know. 01:50:32 Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's so what do you do? Because obviously it's like, Okay, you got your setup, so you can rig your shock to be connected properly to the strap. But you're let's just say you do your you are pulling out a stranger and they don't have they don't have any of this, and they don't have the hooks that are built into a lot of rigs. Now either, what are you attached to? And how sure? 01:50:55 Speaker 4: So I carry stuff for the for the other guy who's not prepared, and I do it selfishly because I don't want to damage my stuff because you got to help them, Yeah, and especially here in Montana, and you know it's the way of the West, right, we help each other. Yeah. And so there's straps that you can buy that can wrap an axle. There's which is still not your best situation. Anytime you can use legitimate toe points like people's hitches or there are some factory recovery points that come from the factory that are legitimate. Not all of them are. So some of those hooks that you see on the bottom of trucks, those are only to be able to be tied down on the assembly line. Oh really yeah, or to help in towing the truck whatever it is, to the dealership where it will be sold, and they stay on it. So they're not always the best. So you use your best judgment there depends on the forces that you're going to use and all that. How have you ever, recovery is this? Some of those little hooks really aren't the best, So just be smart. I carry extra straps that I can wrap things with and attach my dynamic straps to with bow shackles or now a really common thing is soft shackles, and they're even better. We've pretty much replaced all of our d rings with soft shackles. They kind of look like Chinese finger traps. They have a loop on one end and a knot on the other and you can slide them open and wrap it around and put the knot through the opening, and that's actually what you use to recover from. It creates a closed system and it's fabric. They weigh nothing and they're super strong. 01:53:00 Speaker 1: Wrap that around pretty much anything, right, You could wrap that around an axle if you had to. 01:53:05 Speaker 4: Yep, there's good flexibility to those two. So I carry, you know, being me the industry I'm in, I carry bow shackles and I carry soft shackles, but I carry mostly soft shackles. Now, I keep a couple of the other bow shackles with me, but like, I'll carry four soft shackles. 01:53:23 Speaker 1: And will you, will you Clay be able to do us and all of our listeners a favor and maybe run through a lot of these items that we've talked about and just make up a quick list with a couple examples and links to some of these items, because I'm sure, like right now, I'm like, I'm trying to pay attention to our conversation, but I'm thinking I need to make a list. Yeah, sure of stuff I need to go by. 01:53:46 Speaker 4: So the probably the most trusted, it is, the most trusted recovery company in the United States is warn They've been around for seventy five years. This is their seventy fifth anniversary this year. 01:53:57 Speaker 1: Same ones that make the winches, right, they. 01:54:00 Speaker 4: Make the winches, but they also make all the recovery stuff, so they are in the business of recovery, so they have great snatch straps. They have great kits that you can buy, and to me, it's a no brainer to buy the kits. They have their Epic kit, they have the New Factor fifty five. It's a company that they purchased really high end stuff if you're looking into the very best. But they have their budget kits too, which are perfect for the hunting truck. It comes with a little bag, it's got everything you need in there to run a winch and to have safe extractions in tow. It's a no brainer to just buy the kit. And they're on Amazon. I would say support your local off road shop or shop that has it. That would be much better. But yeah, they're easy to get, they're widely available and that's a great place to start. Beyond that, Max Tracks Same Recovery store. Where you know your off road, your your dark horse, customs, your wherever you are in the world, there's an off road shop pretty close or a good shop online that can support you there. Try to support those local businesses as much as you can. They go for about when are they three hundred a pair now for max tracks. Ye, and that again buy once, cry once when it when when it comes to that, because they're going to hold up then they have great warranty. What else have we got? We got High Left Jack High Left is. Don't buy the Chinese version there. It comes down to how they're made, the metallurgy and the quality of the metal. So buy an American Maid High Lift if you can. The Hydraula Jack ARB is probably the easiest one to get a hold of, and they are also sold at the same place as these other ones are all the recovery straps, et cetera. What else we got Tire repair kit AARB makes a great one. You can eat The slime version at Walmart is yeah, pretty dang good. 01:56:10 Speaker 1: You know I've used that too. Yeah, that's Meat Eater Crew approved. Because we saw often travel and then just rent a suburban that in rental vehicles. I'n't even heard of other groups like going and buying new tires and having them put onto their rental vehicles to when they go in and do a hunt for a week and then just eating the cost of that. But anyways, we haven't done that, but we've bought those kits that you're saying, those green slime ones at Walmart, And I mean we had a trip in New Mexico where I mean we had to go back to get more plugs. I think because we were ripping through so many tires. It's just that weird kind of sharp rock I guess that was on these roads and the tires were super cheap. And yeah, rental tires can get you in a bad place real quick. But yeah, those uh, those green slime kits, I can tell you they. 01:57:00 Speaker 4: Work pre day and good. And these uh portable air compressors from arb or vay Air you can fly with them and oh cool. Yeah, throw them in the box, put them in as part of your check checked luggage. 01:57:14 Speaker 1: The rental car hilarious. 01:57:15 Speaker 4: You know, the most capable off road vehicle in the world is a rental car, and everyone likes to use them like that too, So make sure that you carry with what you've done there. Have a tire repair kit and an air compressor, and you can you can tackle a lot of stuff. It brings you a lot of peace of mind. 01:57:32 Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, until you just have worn through all the tires and then you realize you got to start swapping tires from one rental to another, just so you can get the broken tires down into town to get them fixed. Yeah, that's where we got to on that trip. All right, Let's uh, let's see that was the top five items, but there's a few additional options and I carry some of these things. Let's rip through a couple of the those are top five and I'm kind of surprised that a shovel didn't make your top five kit. 01:58:03 Speaker 4: Well, if you have recovery boards, you kind of already have a shovel, I see. So if definitely you're going to carry more than five things, you should, you know, but for the sake of you know, keeping things simple, the best five things. But yeah, quickly into number six. We have like the first aid kit. We called it the vehicle first Aid Kit, and that has tire repair, a shovel. A first aid kit should be in every vehicle, not one that's in your pack. It's one that's dedicated to the vehicle, YEP, headlamps and recovery strap, which is part of just that first aid kit that you know, go buy that kit from warn or whoever Max Tracts makes one to whoever. Just have that as part of your vehicle first aid kit. Yeah, and a shovel. A shovel is a shovel. You don't have to spend lots of money on a shovel. There's lots of ways you can. But uh, you know, even if you go get that rental car and you're hunting somewhere and flew from Montana to New Mexico, roll into you know, home depot and buy the fifteen dollars shovel with a long handle, as flat as it can be so you can get under a stuck vehicle. Don't want one with a lot of curve to. 01:59:19 Speaker 1: It, so you would recommend more like the square shape what do they call it, like a transfersion, like. 01:59:26 Speaker 3: A scoop shovel. 01:59:28 Speaker 4: I always go with the spade, Okay, yeah, go spade, Yeah, just because go ahead. 01:59:37 Speaker 3: Yeah. 01:59:37 Speaker 2: One I've been using for snow is an avalanche shovel because they're smaller, not quite as wide as like a regular scoop shovel, and they're just more compact. The handle can telescope at least the ones that we have perfect. Yeah, it's just like it's small, super easy to use, and you I like it. 01:59:57 Speaker 4: I think every year Costco does a on cheap snow shovels, and a lot of our cars around here have a Costco snow shovel thrown in the back with all that stuff. So if you want to go really high end, you get into demo shovels. They're made out of salt lake and they're they're like the Gucci of snow shovels, you know, or cars with specialty mounts and all that stuff. We've worked with them for years too, and good stuff. But yeah, have a shovel, have. 02:00:28 Speaker 1: A shovel, Okay, And then you had a couple additional options written down there to number one with battery jump. 02:00:35 Speaker 4: So some of this comes down to just rounding out back to the immobilization due to power or due to fuel or due to you know, mechanical stuff, right, so battery jump back. The next most likely thing that happens, what would make you immobilized is you have a dead battery. You can't you know, you you were excited on the trail that morning, you left the key on a little bit, and by the next day when you come back after your overnight, your truck is dead. So have and you're at the end of a trailhead. Hopefully you're hunting where no one else is, so there's probably not anyone else coming. You need to be self sufficient, have a battery pack with you. You can jump yourself with one of those tire chains we've talked about that that they can be extremely beneficial and really deep snow when you've got to keep moving and mud to back east will in eastern Montana, you'll use these in the gumbo and they'll get you out too, because it's just it's just grabbing a lot of material and throwing it that's allowing you to move forward. A winch, you know there we've talked about simple things that require no skills and you know, or hookups, but there's a time when you need a winch. You need a winch because you're working with heavy machinery. At this point, your car's weigh a lot and if there's a certain point where you need true recovery mechanical advantages of a winch to get you out. A five can jerry can five sorry, five gallon jerry can of gas or diesel, and it'll help that that guy you come across, guy or gal that you come across. It'll allows you to be a good neighbor or it'll get you out if you make a mistake, you know, or whatnot. And then carry your factory jacks right there. That's on there, and your optional additions. Make sure you have your factory jacks. Yeah, and then other stuff simple things. Fuses, you know, that's the next thing that could cause something to go wrong. Make sure you have spare fuses in the club box. Yeah, that gets pretty far. And then a toolkit, you know, have some basic tools. Go to home depot or wherever and buy the the general one hundred and fifty piece set or whatever and have it sitting in the back so that you can. 02:02:55 Speaker 3: Do some bas how to use it too and know how to like know how to fix stuff. 02:03:00 Speaker 4: Yeah. On there, work on your own cars a little bit. You know, we're all real busy and we're trying to save as much time as we can in places. But you know there's an advantage to working on your truck a little bit and have that experience before you before you need it. 02:03:14 Speaker 1: Well, what would you say is that is the common mechanical failure that can actually be fixed in the back country. 02:03:22 Speaker 4: Right off the bat, obviously is tires fixing. That's the most common failure point and have all these different ways of being fixed. As we discussed, Let's see what else. I've seen a lot of lug nuts, sheared off tires, you know, carry some spare lugs. That's fixable in the field. Let's see hoses usually, but you know a lot of these are avoidable if you're really into the maintenance of your vehicle. Look at it. My grandpa always used to say that your truck talks to you. Just listen it. Just the squeaks, the sounds, the new vibrations, and chase them. Don't just assume, don't normalize. Say what is that? And go find it? And that'll that'll keep you out of being immobilized a lot. 02:04:18 Speaker 3: Awesome. 02:04:20 Speaker 1: Okay, last, but not least, a lot of stuff you gotta carry, keep organized, keep, most likely hopefully tucked away and not really using. So where do you put all this stuff? What's give me? 02:04:34 Speaker 4: Like? 02:04:34 Speaker 1: I know, there's the ex overland version of organizing, and then there's also the hey, like can I just chuck it in a five gallon bucket and bungee cord it to the you know, the front end of my bed? Like what do you recommend there? 02:04:48 Speaker 4: Yeah? So uh. Number one, make sure you have it even if you don't have a way to secure it very well, make sure you do have it on your next adventure. These things to save to save you from the adventure you don't want. But storage solutions is the next big topic here, and we use all kinds of things. There's drawer systems that you can order that fit into the back of your SUVs or truck beds. Decked is a good one outback solutions from a RB Goose Gear out of California. There's a lot of systems that we can get into later on organizing your truck. But the important thing here is the principle called load and lash, and this applies to more than just the stuff that we're throwing in the truck here. This applies to your equipment and your gear, and your rifles and your bows and all that have a way to secure it down, strap it down. Because in the event of an accident, a lot of people are hurt in rollovers and in accidents by the materials inside their car, not the accident itself. People have been killed by the things that don't need to be killed from the stuff flying around the vehicle. So the way I look at it. When I'm doing best practice. I look at my vehicle and said, okay, I'm going to have a rollover today. How does my vehicle look? What do I need to throw a strap over it? And especially when you got kids and all that stuff, think that one next step because it may not be your fault, maybe somebody else hitting you or God forbid you know, look at Okay, if I have to roll over today, what do I not want flying around to hit me? And get into load and lash principles. 02:06:34 Speaker 1: And how do you commonly do that? 02:06:36 Speaker 4: Ratchet straps, Yeah, we do so toolboxes in the back of trucks that are bolted to the vehicle, not just sitting there. They need to be bolted down otherwise you have a huge missile that's just ready to go. Straps, netting. You can get some pretty cheap netting at auto stores, sportsmen and all that they carry netting that you can throw over things and load and lash down using seat bolts, using the bottom of seats, however they're attached. We've even gone and bought climbing anchors for walls that you then thread a different bolt through the seat and now it becomes an attachment point. For a care beaner, so you can utilize those places to keep things latched, lash down and tight. 02:07:28 Speaker 1: Got it? Get serious? You don't want to come see my setup because obviously I've got a way to just kill my whole family riding around when I go. 02:07:40 Speaker 4: It's certainly all guilty of it. 02:07:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, but I usually try to keep it between the mustard and the mayo, as they say, And I don't I drive slower than faster anymore. And yeah, but I will take a lot of these these tips and especially the stuff around safety and put it to use. This has been great. 02:08:00 Speaker 3: Lutely. 02:08:00 Speaker 1: Anything else, Jordan or Clay that you guys feel like we missed or we want to cover off on? 02:08:08 Speaker 2: No, there's so much more stuff to dive into. We'll just have to have you back on. 02:08:12 Speaker 4: I'd love to. Yeah, I feel like we're very thorough today with the topic at hand. I feel great about it. I would say we did have down here the why why after this whole podcast why would you do this? And we wrote down here these items and the knowledge of how to use them allow you to be the hero. Being prepared allows you to go further, you know, and that's it. You know, you can be the hero to someone else who's having a bad day. We all have bad days out there. You have the tools, and we as adventurers out there, need to be prepared and this allows you, hopefully give you some steps to being more prepared out there. 02:08:55 Speaker 2: So yeah, and I can tell you after being stuck like a kajellion times every time time I'm like what I would give just to have recovery boards or I should have bought that or whatnot, Like gosh, it's it just really derails a weekend, derails your entire trip when something just goes wrong that could have been preventable. 02:09:17 Speaker 1: Yep. 02:09:18 Speaker 4: Yeah. And if you did have all the stuff in your weekend goes wrong, well then you were prepared for that. You know, it's not due to you, it's due to other circumstances. That's that's where that's the kind of adventure mishap that I want, is when I was prepared for but I couldn't overcome. 02:09:37 Speaker 1: Yeah, you could overcome it. Yeah, yeah, all right, let's do it just to to finish up, if you have the time, play, let's do a couple scenarios and then just tell me how you would best to get out of here. Because I almost got stuck turkey hunting. A couple of weeks ago. We went and hunted and it rained for three days straight. Wasn't like real crazy heavy, but just now stop. And the roads to where we're at, they're not quite I wouldn't call them, you know, Missouri river breaks gumbo, but it I mean they were getting slick and boogery, and I mean, you know all the adjectives for those types of roads where your tires are just completely caked and filled. And it had dried out just enough, and I was like, well, we wanted just to drive the road a mile, just to save us the hike of a mile. We were running out of time and it had gotten a little tacky. You were like, oh, let's go and try it. Well, of course, you know, ninety percent of it's just fine. We'd come around this corner and there's a pretty big we're just like to be like a puddle. I thought, Oh, I'll just ease right through it, no big deal. Well, that corner happened to be extra clayey, extra gumboie, and I got right to the middle of this puddle and then all of a sudden, all four wheels just spinning now I got lucky and just started doing the old drive punch it, reverse punch it, drive punch it, And after I don't know ten twenty of those, I somehow wiggled my way back out of there. I really thought that I would that it did not seem as though I was gonna make it, because it was just so viscous right that that mud, and it just seemed like I was going deeper and I was. Although I was throwing a lot of moisture and sort of this muddy soupy mess, it wasn't really moving much. So let's just say I I get to the point where I do that for ten minutes, back and forth, back and forth, and it's just not moving. My tires are still spinning. I'm not high centered, but the this, this whatever, super viscous muddy mess is not allowing me to get out of this hole. What's uh, and we've got now I've gone and done done my shopping, I've got all this stuff in my truck. What's how would you get out of there? Great question? 02:11:52 Speaker 4: Uh, so we have this saying, yeah, it went in doubt, throttle out. You know that can be to your advantage as long as you're you know, a thousand decisions are going to be made quickly in your head. Whether that's the right decision, We're not going to wargain that right now. You made that decision, and because you still had traction and we're able to get a little bit of momentum, you thought you could get out, okay, But then there came a point in your story when you realize that you were stuck. When you realize you're stuck, stop because that's the least amount of stuck you're going to be at that very moment. So how often times I'll just give it a try one more time? Now you're super stuck. Okay, So as soon as you realize you're stuck, you're stuck. Now, a lot of guys and possibly gals have ego around getting stuck. The ego goes away. A lot of us around here, we don't have ego around being stuck anymore. It's just part of the scenario. So when you're stuck, you're stuck. Okay, I've identified that's where I am, and then the next thing is going to be what's going to get me my traction or my momentum next, the path of least resistance first, then determine if that's really the best. So more than likely your max tracks or recovery board placed in the right spot, because you're so close already, is going to get you out of there the fastest, So placing those getting the momentum back, and maybe putting some of those boards in some of the spots that you know, as you've accelerated, you kind of get into those money spots and you sink into things and you kill your momentum. Throw your boards down in that so that when your truck does get to it, it has new found purchase and can continue to accelerate out kind of patch the road, so to speak. So you might need a couple under the wheels to get going, and then a couple out in the worst spots and give it a go. That would be my next choice. 02:14:00 Speaker 1: And with a full drive vehicle, assuming it's the whole, is all things equal that you're stuck in and it's twelve inches of watery mud, you know in the back and in the front as well, would you go on the front wheels more than the back wheels or is it going to be six is? As to where you put those. 02:14:20 Speaker 4: Boards depends more than likely when you got stuck, you probably had a sense of what tires were spinning. Unless you were running full lockers where your axles are locked through. You're going to have an idea of what my front driver side was spinning and my rear passenger side was spinning. That's where you're going to want to put your max tracks, got it, because those are all of your power through your four wheel drive system, through your transfer case and the diffs, the open diffs are being lost to the path of least resistance, so give them some resistance. And the other thing you can do is you could just set a little bit of e breake pressure if you want, which applies a little bit of pressure to that one wheel that's spinning. If you don't have lockers, you can apply even on older cars. The newer cars kind of override this now, but you could apply just slight amount of brake pressure and then accelerate through the brake pressure because it allows the wheel to not want to so easily spin off. Yeah, so that's that's a left foot right foot brake technique that just apply a little bit and then you kind of massage it. You see where it works, and sometimes it's just enough to get you get all four tires moving again. 02:15:40 Speaker 3: Nice. 02:15:41 Speaker 4: Yeah, And then looking at the weight of the vehicle. So if you have a pickup with nothing in the back, all of your weights on that front axle over the engine, So that's where gonna you're gonna have the most amount of traction potentially there that so your front tires might be pulling you out before your rear tires push you out. 02:16:01 Speaker 1: Got it. But for whatever reason, when you do chains, they always they say not usually not to put them on your front tires. Is that just because when you turn the tires the chains they're going to beat up your fenders or what is the reasoning for not putting chains on front tires? 02:16:17 Speaker 4: Uh? Yeah, there's a lot of Yeah, I put chains on my front tires. 02:16:23 Speaker 1: You do. 02:16:24 Speaker 3: It's a clearance issue. 02:16:25 Speaker 4: Clearance, especially the new modern cars have that upper control arm. There's a lot of clearance problems. So you run a risk when you put chains on because now with the new modern vehicles, we have all these sensors that go into the wheel sensors and the antilock brakes and all kinds of stuff go the speed sensors. Sometimes, just know that if you put chains on and it all goes wrong, you might be disabling and breaking those things that you'll have to repair later. The rear typical has more clearance in the wheel wells and less going on that a chain is safer to put there. But yeah, in a muddy situation, the only thing is is if you only have chains on the rear and not on the front, steering can become a major problem, right, because you can push, but you can't steer. It can't pull you through the corner. You're essentially relying on your front tires to become kind of skis in a way, and you it's more of a suggestion versus if it also has chains on it, it'll steer by pulling through the corner. 02:17:34 Speaker 1: Sure, sure, all right. Another scenario, you got us out of the mud hole. This one, I think is very common to haunters. It's getting to be in it's in November. Roads have gotten frozen. Thought frozen thought. But it's early in the morning, so it's frozen from the night and you're going along some forest service road or maybe it's just a dirt road on a ranch or whatever, and it's not quite the road is not, you know, horizontal anymore. It's got a little pitch to it off. You know, going downhill, you're cruising along in dry conditions. It's fine because you got plenty of grip, but the snow is set up so that it's it's getting a little bit slick, and you get to a spot and all of a sudden you start to get that slide and you go and it's almost like you're rule about like, once you're stuck, just don't make yourself any more stuck. You realize that going forward anymore you're just gonna start slipping, and pretty soon you're gonna have two wheels actually off this road and on the hill, and then you're in real trouble. So you sort of you're not stuck yet, you've put it in park, but you're in a precarious spot right like you're really close to losing two wheels if you go forward. You don't feel comfortable, just like backing out of there. What's the play there? 02:19:04 Speaker 4: There's an old ranch technique, an old backcountry road technique where you can self sand the road. So you get your shovel out and you go to the dirt hill next to it. You're all parked out and you start digging into the hill and you start sanding that hill that corner with the material that you're able to extract. If you're gonna so your shovel's coming in big time right there. That's gonna help. That's one of the ingredients to a cocktail that we'll make here. 02:19:36 Speaker 1: Next. 02:19:37 Speaker 4: Recovery boards. If they have the proper spikes below them, they can dig pretty well, and you could you could inch your way across something like that using a recovery board because they have their own like spikes underneath them that dig pretty good. We have used. Depending on the extra in this case, you may be able to take a I don't know if i'd recommend that you really you can get into some really techy things like you know, tying a toe strap off to a tree up high or whatever, not letting your truck slide any lower and use the the strap to as a pivot point. Things like that just to assist from uh, there's things like that. I don't know. That's that's a that's a tricky one. I don't know if airing down necessarily would help in this situation. Just depends on the surface. You may want that traction from a lot of pressure, more pressure per square inch versus spreading. The pressure just depends on what you kind of read the road as I would sand it first. Really it comes down to that. 02:20:52 Speaker 3: I feel like chains would help. 02:20:53 Speaker 4: The chains. If you got chains would resolve this issue. You may slip a little bit, have a little bit of you know, because the chains are never a consistent contact patch. They you know, you roll over a chain, then it's smooth and all. Roll over a chain, you would just gather your momentum and drive through it. You wouldn't really go slow, you'd kind of get after it and get out at that. At that point, definitely, if you have lockers in the vehicle, disengage lockers, yeah, because it'll if one if they both spin, then they can both break traction at once and then it becomes a sled. So on an off cambridge situation where the road is turning, say it's turning to the right, but the road leans to the right as well, that it doesn't that's called off camber, lockers are bad in that situation. Disengage lockers because you want. 02:21:52 Speaker 3: Is that basically your traction control. 02:21:55 Speaker 4: Traction control depends on the vehicle that you're running, but it is managed through the ABS system. Your braking system, and it was managed essentially by a pump that pulses the anti lock breaks that allows a wheel to not slip as it starts to slip, it just breaks it momentarily. It's like up it just with electric pulses and they work amazingly well. Traction control would be a good option in this at this time over lockers, because lockers are mechanically locked, there's no forgiveness. Okay, traction control functions would manage it better in this case. Most control is a good option. 02:22:38 Speaker 1: Most people, or most newer trucks, they don't even come with the option to lock your diffs anymore, right, I mean, it's that's kind of few and far between, am I correct? 02:22:50 Speaker 4: It's coming back. A lot more have them, so that all the new Tundras in the tierty off road format, the new trail Hunter coming out as that. The Denali's have that in their eighty four. The Colorados have front end rear lockers now in some of their upfit options, so a lot of the Fords, the Broncos do, so they have really made a comeback in more modern vehicles. There's kind of a gap in there from say like two thousand to twenty seventeen. You know, there's a lot of manufacturers even eighteen nineteen weren't putting lockers in there. But with the rise of off road and overlanding, the demand for lockers in the consumer base has been risen so much that it's now a great selling point. So a lot of these vehicles have them now in the right package or the right grade. So yeah, they're there. But the traction control that many more cars have is remarkably efficient and effective. 02:24:01 Speaker 3: Interesting. 02:24:03 Speaker 1: Cool. 02:24:05 Speaker 2: Well, I think we're probably getting pretty close to the end of our time. Anything you want to pitch in, yann. 02:24:10 Speaker 1: You No, I'm good. I got way too much to think about now. 02:24:14 Speaker 3: I know me too, I got a list going here. 02:24:16 Speaker 1: Thanks Claire, I appreciate it. Man. Let's uh, let's get together and do it again and just we'll talk just going car camping and all the actual camping gear outside of the truck gear. Does that sound like it gonna be awesome? Good plan for the next one? 02:24:32 Speaker 4: Sure? 02:24:33 Speaker 3: Cool? 02:24:33 Speaker 2: Yeah, And just like always, anybody has any questions on this, shoot us an email gear talk at themeeater dot com and we can tackle them in a future episode or get notes going for your future episode. 02:24:46 Speaker 1: Thanks for listening,