Engine and general problems or fixes for our farm pickups

Here are a couple of photos of the tires I just put on that farm pickup, they remind me of a smaller scale of a course highway tractor drive tire. While it was tempting to go find some mud, I don't feel like making ruts anywhere nor get the truck stuck and have no interest in washing it after the ordeal. I took it down the gravel and the odd item did fly off the tires but more so on the soft sticky edge of the road and on the short drive on the highway all I heard was wind and engine noise, no tire howling at all but then I really would not have cared anyway given how few times it goes anywhere on a highway. The ride, oh its utterly fantastic, just like sitting on a cement park bench which is no different then with other tires I have used on it as its not a great riding truck and only have 35 psi in the front and 40 in the rear. They are a stiff heavy tire for their size and that is to be expected. By the way the tires these ones are leaning up against is a set of Falken Wildpeak AT3W for another vehicle as a comparison.

That reminds me of a retired couple I know who was up here visiting a few years ago and they had an older GM duramax pickup single rear wheel with a slide in camper and it would have been plenty heavy for the truck but it seemed to carry it ok. So after they left they took a detour to Kinuseo falls which is near Tumbler Ridge in BC. Its a solid but rough gravel road because of a lot of potholes on the roads surface, its not the mushy soft gravel road that I think a lot of us on here are used to when wet. So they head on down that road and it dead ends at the falls and its a fair ways away from anything help wise, Tumbler Ridge is the closest town which is about 65 km away from the falls. He had 10 ply Hankook tires on the truck with reasonable tread left. Getting closer to the falls they have a flat on one of the rear tires and just shredded the tire as either he didn't notice or it leaked and got dangerously low and then fell apart. So they struggle to put on the spare and go the rest of the ways to the falls. They stay there overnight and the next day are driving out of there and part way out the other rear tire completely fails which had been a match to the one that failed the day before. They are screwed, there is NO cell service out there unless one had a Sat phone. A trucker comes along that was doing something down that road and picks them up and gives them a ride into town. They went to the one and only tire/shop in town and fluked off as the guy had some tires on wheels that would fit and took them out there with his tow/service truck and put on the wheels to get it back to the town and then took those or some other tires to put on the factory pickup wheels to get them going again. So that stuck in my head, Hankook tires and two failed tires. I will never know if it was partly the tires fault or more a factor of the person behind the wheel as I got the idea he was driving way too fast for that road and with all that weight of the camper the tires could not handle hitting sharp edged holes.

Like you said Kevlar, to have two sets of a tire do the same thing and if you've had other tires of equal specs on the same or similar weighted vehicle and not had that problem, that sure points to a design flaw.

Speaking of Costco a couple of items come to mind. One was that quite a few years ago Costco had a tire with I believe the Kirkland name on it and they had this wonderful wear out warranty on it, if it wore out prematurely they would install a new set for nothing. Well that only flew for a few years and they put an end to that, Peace Country gravel roads in every direction ( like a lot of rural western Canada ) so guys were melting off their tires and coming in for new ones, it was a great deal !. One of my friends down the road did just that, and yes they threw on a new set because the reality was that the tire could not handle gravel any better than anything else.

The other item which may apply to a lot of tire shops but certainly to Costco, if you bring in the rims only to get tires put on, they do not warranty anything or at least not mileage because they did not confirm the mileage on the vehicle. Like this week, I brought in the old tires/rims of the truck that sat here with one flat tire to the tire shop to install the new tires and I honestly don't know if that would disqualify me for some unforeseen warranty issue or not. Given that he is more of an independent shop in a sense, the owner is behind the counter running the show so I suspect he would do right by the customer as much as he can vs a corporate big chain store would probably handle things differently.

That is some 13 years ago or so I took a drive out there in late May ( just had finished seeding ) to Kinuseo falls and in fact was driving my g/f's crappy dodge suv two wheel drive unit and I drove as I knew it would not be a steering wheel holder road and it certainly was not. It reminded me more of pavement with sharp edged potholes everywhere and I took it very easy and had no issues at all, certainly could have if I drove like a clueless person on a road condition like that. Its a very interesting falls and of course was flowing very nicely in the spring. A guy that grew up in this same area and went to the same school, he lives out in Tumbler and runs a river boat tour trip up the river to the base of the falls, my brother took that tour some years back and said it was quite interesting. Definitely love the Rockies and the landscapes they provide both in Canada and the USA.