So, we're back inside at AxleBoy Offroad. We've got our 2020 Jeep Gladiator Sport S. One of the elements that I just can't stop talking about the Gladiator Sport S, as it sits stock, I've been driving it a little bit over the last few weeks and it's still gets a lot of attention even the way it is now because not everybody out there is familiar that, now Jeep has a pickup truck and I find every time somebody walks up to me and says, "Oh, this is really cool." I go, "No, it's going to have 37 inch wheels." That's the first thing I go to and I pull out my phone and show them the picture, so Scott, tell us about this wheel.
Yeah.
Tell us about the benefit it's going to do for us and what do we have in store here?
Absolutely, so we partnered with our friends at TeraFlex again, on this wheel, this is a Nomad wheel and what we have is a cast aluminum wheel. Now, the benefits of this wheel on the inside where the tire actually seats, we have sort of a cerated or a roughened edge and raised beads, rings to help keep the tire from becoming unseated from the rim when we got an aired down and off road, so you get the benefits that are similar to a beadlock, but you don't have any of the downfalls and the maintenance that go along with a beadlock.
And the beadlock is when it has that functional piece that has all those little adjustments on it.
Yes and you have to constantly torque those on a continual basis, not to mention that the legality on road is in question. It just depends on what authority you're talking to that day. With this wheel, we don't have anything to worry about with that. They've really thought this through, the next big thing that we see off road, besides the beads coming off the wheels, the valve stems get tore off, so you're looking at this and you see these really beautiful anodized red knobs, but what are they really for? And if we undo one, we can see that our valve stem is actually recessed.
Oh, so, it's like a protective...
This whole thing is protecting it, yeah. If you're going to rip off the valve stem, you're going to break the wheel, I mean literally, so this is all sealed. It has a nice O-ring seal, so it's going to keep all the dirt and the grit out and this would be how you air it up, under here we have our standard TPMS sensor that comes with the vehicle, it fits right in there, it's designed to.
So, TP, tire pressure-
Tire pressure monitoring system.
... monitoring system, so in the dashboard of the Gladiator, it'll tell us what all four tires PSI is.
Absolutely, so we're going to be able to retain that feature.
And it has a matching red knob.
The other knob, right, so the other thing we're going to do, you and I have talked about, when you go off road and you start your adventure that we're going to need to air our tires down.
Air them down, so you've got one pressure the road on the highway.
Correct.
And then you want a lower pressure-
A lower pressure off road.
... off road.
Right. This is going to do a couple things. One, it's going to give us a better tire contact or more tire contact on the ground or on the surface. It's also going to give us a much more comfortable ride off road as well and normally we had to get out and we have to get additional tools and all this stuff to make this happen, it's just not an easy thing. TeraFlex took care of that for us and what they have is an adjustable built in deflator, so we turn this or turn this knob and we start deflating the tire and it's automatic, so once we have the pressure set, it'll stop where we want it to, it's adjustable to the center screw.
So, what's it set at now?
I don't know that they've been dialed in yet, but probably about...
What would you dial it in to?
For what we're doing with this vehicle, which is more camping and that sort of thing, probably around 13, 14.
13 or 14.
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now there's one more thing I really want to talk about with this wheel and you know I like driving on the rocks, right? I know you might not as much, but I really do and the one thing that drives me crazy is the wheel getting scratched up, so you buy this expensive wheel and you go rub it on rocks and it gets scratched up, they've thought about that too. Here we have a nylon bash ring, let's call it and this is replaceable. It's the material that it's made out of is colored all the way through, so even if we scuff it, it's going to stay colored properly.
It's going to protect the edge of the wheel. Our brand new wheels aren't going to get destroyed on the rocks. When we decide that they're too torn up and they need to be changed, undo some screws, throw new ones on, we're good to go and they look brand new so, we don't tear up the wheels, so we pretty much covered all the problems we would typically have with an offroad Jeep wheel.
So tell me about this, and we've learned about the wheel, tell me about this tire.
Yeah, so we partnered with Falken tire on these. This is the Wildpeak M/T, now several reasons we chose the Falken brand, one is they're one of the roundest, best balancing tires out there on the market. They're priced extremely competitive and for a mud tire, it's one of the quietest you can choose, so this isn't going to sound like a Jack hammer going down the road.
You're going to have a little bit of sound to it more than you would on your typical all-terrain or all season, but you're still going to be able to carry on a conversation and talk on the phone on hands free or whatever you need to do going down the highway. Now, this is one of the most aggressive sidewalls out there on the market in terms of puncture resistance. We do have a three ply sidewall, but two of those plies actually go down and wrap back up and what that does in terms of puncture resistance is it gives us the effective ability of a five ply tire without the ride, so it keeps the weight down, keeps it balanced. We do have an aggressive mud train type pattern. The way that the lugs are built, they're staggered and what that does is it cancels out the noise.
If we look at these ridges here, we've got mud and stone ejectors. This gets the wheel cleaned out, you get it spinning and you can throw all that debris out. We've got some ring siping here going on. This is going to help us in our all weather situations and not to mention that we've got an aggressive sidewall, when we air down, these upper ridges can actually make contract with the ground. They give you additional biting power plus protection for the sidewall by make it a little bit thicker.
So, aired down it becomes even wider.
Absolutely.
Contact with this section.
Correct and this is a long lasting tire. They typically don't rate mud terrain tires for how long they're going to last, but these are up there at the top. We tend to find that, regularly balanced and aligned we can see 45,000 miles out of a set of these without any problem.
Where can somebody go to learn more about Falken tires?
falkentire.com.
F-A-L-K-E-N.
Correct.
tire.com. That's great. Well, thanks a lot to TeraFlex and to Axleboy Offroad. To learn more, you can go to teraflex.com or visit us at axleboy.com.