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The rear tyres would bag out quite a lot. Here is us on the barge on the way back, the rear tyres still at 22 psi. At this stage we had unloaded all 110lt of water before we got on the barge and had about 40lt (out of 120lt) of fuel left in the tank. It took a bit of guesswork in the beginning to sort out the tyre pressures, just kept on dropping then until it "felt right" - the car seems to struggle less on on the sand at the right pressure. We used that combination ( 15/22) on soft sand on our trip without any problems, so I just drop the tyres down to that now. If you have the OEM Defender alloy rims, the chance of it popping a bead is a lot less and on steel rims, their have an internal ridge on the wheel, getting the bead off is very difficult, I had the hi lift jack on the tyre and picked up the whole back of the car without the tyre coming off the internal bead. R&R beadbreaker or Tyre pliers is the only way to get them off. ( Of the two, buy the Tyrepliers, much much easier than the R&R and a whole lot cheaper)
The front ones at 15psi have a similar length - but look at the height difference between mine and the Land Cruiser in front.
This what the extra inch of clearance means - you don't drag the diffs through the sand when in wheel ruts.
Here is us fully loaded on Fraser at Sandy Cape. Tyres leaving not much of an imprint on the harder sands
Compared to us on the Anne Beadell Highway, on Fraser we had a lot less weight up top and inside. In addition to the roof top tent which has all the bedding and our latex pillow, there is a solar panel under the tent, a bag full of tent poles, shade cloth, small beach tent, a wind break screen behind the tent, we have three boxes with clothes on top of that is our stainless steel side table. There was up to 75lt of fuel and 5 litre of engine oil, an 2.4hp outboard motor, a box with 4kg gas bottle and some interesting rocks the missus wanted to bring back, and another box full of spare radiator hoses, our filter funnel. The sand was softer on the way to the aircraft wreck, and dunes much steeper. So weight up top was pretty high, but we also had a lot of weight down low, and I kept the fuel tank full, moving fuel from the roof to the tank every time we stopped.
The rear did wobble around on the tarmac when the tyre pressures were low, we drove into Cobber Pedy and didn't bother pumping up the tyres until we got there. We still did 90kph on the tarmac, and the tyre temperatures did not get over 60 degrees.
Originally Posted by voltron
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