Thread: New shoes for Defender, Toyo OPATS.

Defninately want in on this one especially how they go on the black stuff and under brakes.

Big red is getting to the point where I want to start considering new rubber

Had a quick look at the Toyo site, I think they are the same as what I have on the front of my Rangie, albeit in 255/65 16 sizing. We have quite a few customers with Discoverys running this rubber in 235/75 16 and get nothing but positive feedback on them.

I have Opats for road tyres and easy trips for my Rangie and they are very good. Would not hesitate to recommend them to anyone who wants that type of tyre.

Ian

Will provide feedback. It's the 'that type of tyre' that concerns me. I do about 500km country driving a week, about 40% gravel, 10% beach and the rest on often wet winding black tops.

I figure when i really need a good trye is at 110km in the wet or on gravel with a a massive tree 2m from the shoulder. If you weigh that against bit of extra wheel spin on muddy gravel every so often I will take the speed performance.

Anyway will give feed back. I do not expect the mileage, if I can sqeeze 80,000 out of them thats the same per/km cost as the BFG's on 110,000.

I'm curious about your old BFGs.... I'm thinking about these right now, but AT not MT. I've got MT hankooks on at the moment that I'll throw onto a spare set of rims... use those for off-road (which I do every few months) and road use, which is probably 80% for me, will be ATs....

... I've heard the BFG AT 265/75 R16's look good (nice and wide) and are reasonably good on/off road (... yeah just in case I get lazy to swap the wheels).

Scott

On my second set now----fantastic, getting about 80K on D2
[half unsealed roads] 245.70.16-Roly

Yeah look I can't really fault the BFG AT's, which are not the newer KO's, as they came original on my 2001 Extreme in 235/85/16.

As I said they still have a few ml left after 110,000 and I have never had a puncture or had to use the spare. I do alot of gravel, sand and month up north each year. I have driven over some pretty rough rocky areas with them and they are really no seriuos chips. I have had them down to 10psi on beaches and iflate to 45psi for normal driving.

I also use to tow a flat bed trailer unbraked with 2tonne of wood on it from Perth 400km south many times and never had dramas.

Why change then. Well they are a all round tyre and not really good on gravel or wet roads at high speed. Saying that they are not bad either, it's just the tread pattern is poorly designed IMHO to displace water.

I have a young child on the way and figure the saftey side of going to a more performance tyre will outweigh the loss of performance offroad. Well I'm trying to convince myslef so.

Hi Guys,

Been running Toyo OPATs on our D1 for the last 120,000 km / 4 years - unfortunately not the same set, though. The first set got me in with the Toyo name at $180 a piece!- but I'm not sure the overall value has been good because, over the 4 year period we've lost 3 or 4 tyres to rock fractures when less than half worn. Also, quite a few punctures on gravel roads. Those that have worn out gave only about 60K km, albeit a lot of our kms have been towing 2+ tonne in hot conditions. On road and wet performance has been excellent.

The Toyo dealer in Alice Springs (where we lost several tyres to fractures) swore by them. Said they were getting excellent performance out of them on mining co. Toyotas up the Tanami. Maybe we just had bad luck but I suspect the LT construction sizes like 235/85 R16 are built a lot tougher than the passenger constructions sizes like the Disco's 235/70R16, so the 'fender ones will probably go very well.

I've persisted with them to date because, due to the failures, we've often been buying them one at a time and I wanted to keep all the tyres on the car the same. We've now got a set of 5 all getting low together and I've just about decided to go for BFG ATs in search of 80K+ kms and fewer punctures and failures. Does anyone reckon anything else is a better bet for a D1 that does a lot of towing but also some serious off-bitumen work? (As well as the towing, the Toyos have also been to the Cape, across the Simpson and many Central Oz tracks.)