Although I have one rig, I'm in the process of building another.
My Ural has the same type tire everywhere.
For size and appearance reasons, on my new rig, I want to use a directional M/C front tire on the sidecar.
I have heard that you should run the tire backward if you put it on the car.
Is that correct? Why?
Thanks
The tread of a rear tire is designed for traction when accelerating. When this is reversed the tread pattern assists in stopping traction.
Lonnie
Ken, the sidecar wheel on the rig I bought from DMC has the rotation toward the front, i.e. not reversed. Had not heard of reversing the SC tire direction, but Lonnie's statement makes sense.
When you go Double Darkside, which is mounting a car tire as your pusher and a rear MC tire on the front. Then the conventional wisdom is to reverse the rotation direction of the MC tire on the front.
CCjon
With a directional tread pattern, Lonnie has summed it up nicely. But there is also some consideration to be given to hydroplaning. Not very important for the rear tire since the front tire has already pushed the water out of the way. But for the front tire, yeah, you want to make sure the siping and channels are going to be effective. On the sidecar tire, we can talk about hydroplaning, and we can talk about traction for braking, but the truth of the matter is that the sidecar tire doesn't contribute much to straight line braking, and a hydroplaning side tire is not something I worry about either.
For me, the overwhelming consideration for the sidecar tire is lateral traction in left hand curves. For lateral traction, I don't really think it matters if you mount it frontwards or backwards. For appearance reasons, then, if you plan to use the same tire on the front as on the side, then I'd mount them both in the same direction simply because it looks better that way. If I had a rear tire on my sidecar, and it matched the rear tire on the tug, I'd mount those two tires in the same direction, again simply for appearance sake. Of course, if you use uni-directional tread patterned tires, you can skip this whole thread!
BTW, "darkside" is when you mount a car tire on the rear and "double darkside" is when you mount car tires front and rear. When you have a car pusher with a rear moto tire up front, I don't think we've invented a name yet (though that's the way I've run my last two rigs.) Maybe we should have a contest to come up with a cool new name for that?
"Darkside Bassakward"?
You might be right, I hear Double Darkside thrown around whenever the front tire is changed to anything other than the OEM front tire.
Hmmmm, new term
"Dark and a half"
"Half past midnight"
"Big Dark, Little dark"
"3/4 Double Dark"
