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Monster Truck Tires

InfoZen11 | Oct 22, 2010 |

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Monster trucks live up to their name: they're monster vehicles that must be able to handle difficult and varied terrain. Such terrain requires massive and strong tires. It takes a special tire to handle all the car-eating chores of your average monster truck. In fact, it takes an industrial bulldozer tire.

No matter what other customization you implement for your massive monster truck, the most visually distinct feature will be its tires. When you raise the truck's body high above the ground, one's eyes can not help but rest on the huge round devices where the rubber hits the road.

In many cases, the ideal tire for your own monster truck will come from an agricultural vehicle: the D-12 Cat. This bulldozer by Caterpillar has huge, ultra-rugged tires. Tires so heavy-duty, in fact, that you must shave them to a weight and size your modified truck can manage without burning out the engine and without saturating all that engine's power.

As these Caterpillar tires will require aftermarket customization to make them a more manageable weight for your truck, you must determine how to shave and refine them. D12 tires begin at nearly 1000 or so pounds. You will want them down to about 800 pounds. This process represents a difficult and specialized endeavor.

Can you believe these enormous bulldozer tires were once hand-shaved into monster truck tires for the growing monster truck industry? Today tire manufacturers have developed custom shaving machines based on retreading machines. These machines greatly decrease the time it takes to shave these bad boys down and thus makes aftermarket versions of these tires less expensive than they used to be in the early days of the monster truck industry.

But they're still not exactly cheap. Custom D12 Caterpillar tires must usually be bought from Firestone or Goodyear. They cost around $1800 per tire.

Now, before you go crazy with these enormous tires for your jacked up trucks, you should understand that the core design of the modern monster truck more closely resembles 4WD dune buggies than the pickups you and I like to customize at home. They feature 4-link suspensions with customized chassis designs and lightweight bodies. This allows them to power these huge tires with durable power while remaining stable.