I'm thinking start smol. Say like riding lawnmower tires. The idea is to make any normal looking tire virtually indestructible. I already know this idea is useless for highway use tires, as heat builds up in the tread area rapidly at highway speeds. Take normal looking tires and put something like this in there: RU-320 25A Flexible Polyurethane Unless someone knows of a better one to use.
Not sure if expanding foam is going to work due to the weight of the vehicle. I'm thinking that it would need to be solid ring around the wheel that extends beyond the rim but attached to wheel inner diameter. Think like 2 semi circles with an ID the same as the wheel od by the hub that bolts together and it's thickness is would be greater than the max diameter of the rim. And hard like UHMW plastic so that if the tire went flat or was blown off .. it would have something to ride on. But more than likely, if it were a mine/ied ... it's taking off the entire suspension.
when they moved my conexs in place they had tires that would attatch to the connex,,,,, filled with concrete foam? foam concrete. damn heavy. i think they could tow them on the street. i dunno about highway. dont see how you could balance them unless you spun it as it cured.
I never paid any attention to the tires we had on our M110’s, MRAP’s, and Buffalo mine clearance vehicles, but with the hundreds of ied dets my unit experienced, we never had a single flat tire even though the vehicle they were on was completely destroyed. Don’t ask me how this was remotely possible and I can say from first hand experience that our tires simply withstood everything from lager diameter artillery shells to the MRAP killer ied’s made up of ammonia nitrate fuel oil bombs in a 5-gallon plastic bucket and buried. If you were to search for pictures of any vehicle hit with efp ied’s, even a good majority of the tires on those remained unscathed.
Sort of like the original HMMWVs...2 aluminum half-circles bolted together on the rim with a couple lube packs thrown in. Air loss allows the packs to be ruptured and lube the inside of the tire. BTW expanding foam doesn't hold up.
Somebody...Toyota, Nissan maybe, made car tires with an aluminum run flat insert. Never tried to change one. Didn't look like fun
A buddy of mine bought some old Humvee tires at a police auction,, he was gonna put them on his old 4x4 woods truck,,, when he started taking the tires off the Humvee rims to put on his rims,,, that's when he found them aluminum inner run flat pieces. Not sure what he did with them ,,
Local dump has a front end loader to move stuff. They took it somewhere and got the tires filled with foam plastic. Have seen them using a bar to pry off boards with nails from skids that were stuck to the tire. Don.t think you could operate them anywhere but flat ground and low speed as they have no give in them. The guy operating the tractor's answer to me as to where it was done and how it was done. "Beats me, I don't know and really don't care. It works." Here is one video of using the tires. I never thought of it but one secret is that they vent the tire, create a deliberate leak, to be certain the whole tire is filled with foam as the air is pushed out. Was very interesting. Big advantage is that if shot or run over tire strip, driver can maintain control as there is no change in profile of tire or explosive decompression. Might be even more important for an off road or 4 wheeler type vehicle. Worth thinking about if nothing else than a tire that would stay inflated for years in a storage situation.
The tire place probably used hard urethane compound, that had little to no expansion. The one I found is a urethane expanding foam that increases its volume 5x form when it's mixed. It's supposed to be softer than a pencil eraser.
