Why is there tread on half of the tire?

From the beginning, some eight years ago, until a couple of years ago I purchased tires from Du-Bro and had them shipped to a friend with a laser cutter who would cut away a good portion of the inside diameter so there was room to put a decent sized wheel inside them. This also stiffened them up and made them more resistant to rolling under and burying a wing tip inthe runway.

When someone complained about these tires it was always the same two problems, excessive wear on hard surface runways and roll under. Another complication was the growing end of the market was going to larger wheels which did not play well with the Du-Bro soft foamy tires.

I made up several sets of molds and found a guy to make me my own tire line. After several false starts we came up with what I consider the best compromise for surface durability and cushion. As expected, the tougher the outer surface the harder the tire will be. The asymmetrical tread (see the tire name molded into it) is meant to have the tread on the inside and the flat surface on the outside. The theory here is that it will allow the tire to skid rather than dig in and put the wing tip in the runway.

At worst I think our tires are as good as any on the market today and at best when you look at things that generally denote quality like mild line match up and durometer consistency ours are superior to all the rest.

Your tires don't absorb the shock of hard landings, why?

Our tires are a higher durometer (hardness) than Sullivan or Du-bro tires, and this is intended. Also, a metal hub will have an effective shock absorption rate close to zero. While the tire is expected to absorb a small percentage of the shock loads from the landing gear, ninety percent of the landing load absorption should be handled by the gear itself.

If you are having problems with fuselage damage from landing loads you should look at excessive stiffness in the gear legs or structural deficiencies in the gear mounting structure inside your plane. From my experience, all the current ARF planes have to be landed with a lot of finesse because none of them have sufficient load distribution inside the fuselage. In other words they are rather fragile but very light as a result.

All in all, most like the performance that comes from the light weight.