Tires (Tyres)

Who doesn’t like a new pair, or four, of shoes?

We have been needing new tires for a while and had been holding on for the lower USA to buy them. We have had several punctures, destroyed a tyre driving on it flat, replaced that with a second-hand tire, and ended up with three different types of tire/tread by the time we were in a position to buy new ones.

We were undecided about which sort of tires to buy. Should we get factory sized tires for economy and to keep the speedo correct, or go big which is what we were used to. On our 4Runner in NZ we used Maxxis Mudders 33×1250 tires and found them to be a solid tire.

We were staying with Jim and Rhonda from The Next Big Adventure  in Portland who gave us the names of a few tire places to try. In the end we compromised on a set of 31×10.5 Goodyear Wrangler Duratracs from the Tire Factory for several reasons: They looked the business, they were the right price, the Tire Factory had them on the shelf and we couldn’t find any Maxxis Mudders.

Next day the 4runner was sporting a brand new set of shoes.

In hind sight new tires should have been one of the first purchases we made as the cost of puncture repair/replacement far out weighed any additional costs from buying them in Alaska. Lesson learnt!

The good news is we haven’t had a puncture since … fingers crossed … touch wood.