...and the wheels didn't fall off. lol. And by "the block" I mean the entire country. This is a follow-up to this thread...
http://www.thorforums.com/forums/f27...gas-14108.html
So our daughter had our first grandchild, unfortunately she lives 3100 miles away from us in upstate New York. My wife got some time off work so we decided to drive instead of flying to see the new baby. We threw a bunch of stuff in the Vegas and took off. It had 30 miles on my new wheel/tire swap when we left. Even with the comments about impending doom and death, I had total confidence it would be fine. And it was beyond that, it was AMAZING!
The entire trip me and my wife kept saying the same thing, "OMG I can't imagine taking a trip like this with those cr@ppy little SUV tires on this thing". We don't like to drive slow, we cruised for hours on end at over 75mph, I actually did 3 hours straight at 85+mph! (Notice the speedo in the picture below. GPS speed was actually reading 92mph.) We drove in everything from 100+ degree heat to 30 degrees with snow on the roads. This wasn't really a sight-seeing trip, although we did take several detours to visit friends and see some cool stuff.
So how did the wheels and tires do? Freakin' amazing! After checking the tire temps at a few stops, I ended up running 75psi front and back when checked @70 degrees. The highest tire pressures I saw on the tpms was ~90psi when it was 100+ degrees outside and we were running fast for hours. Perfect temp readings across the entire tread and no tire wear shown whatsoever after putting ~6300 miles on them. I checked the lug nuts a few times, they never lost torque whatsoever. I also checked the front hub temps, they were pretty much slightly above ambient temps. The front rotors and calipers didn't get hot even with heavy braking abuse. The ride and handling is night and day different. The "floaty" feel that the original tires had even at 85psi is gone. It handles like a car in heavy wind and mountain roads. The ride is smoother and quieter by a large margin over the stock tires. And cruising at higher speeds is awesome, much lower rpm's and less rolling resistance with the taller, highway rib tires.
And the last part, gas mileage... We averaged a little below 10mpg for the entire trip! That's pretty darn good considering we averaged probably 70mph for the entire trip. Plenty of headwinds too, we only had one day of nice tailwinds. There's no way we would have gotten that kind of mileage with the smaller all-season tires running that fast.
Anyway, just thought I'd post a follow-up on how the wheel/tire swap worked out on our first long trip. California to upstate New York and back. Northern route there and southern route back. 6 days there and 5 days back, 6300 miles total. I think we stayed in 9 Walmart's and 2 truck stops. lol. All of my mods worked amazing. The only issues were a stress crack at the bottom of the windshield and the furnace wouldn't stay lit on the last night of the trip back. Good thing I put that Coleman Mach 8 Heat Pump on the back! I fired that up and we had heat even though the furnace quit.
The second to last picture below some of you might recognize. It's outside of Wendover on highway 80, before you go across the salt flats towards Salt Lake City. We had to stop there because it was the rest stop that we stopped at almost 30 years ago so I could unbolt our roof AC unit to turn it around backwards!
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