# tire chains do you have them



## Tirediron

I do, but when I was 4 hours from home And heading into the bush pulling my service trailer, I realized that I forgot to throw them in, Easy,I thought, oil town kind of in the middle of nowhere, Somebody will have them, then when I got to location I decided I didn't really need them until the second last day when it snowed another 2 inches. I thought this is easy we are on a main highway heading into the mountains, I stopped at all the places that should have had them, got a blank look. so went back to location and finished my repairs, I was talking to one of the welders, he told me about an other road out, with out the nasty steep hill that I would have turned on to half way up, Got out easy, but I will put the chains in the trucks tool box now. I always carried them when I had a 2 wheel drive dually, but when I got a 4x4 I quit, especially when pulling a trailer, and off road at that


----------



## Davarm

After seeing that and all the other "snow" pictures this year, I'm not going to complain about the Texas summer heat for a long while!


----------



## Grimm

I have them in the trunk even though it has been in the 60s here...


----------



## mosquitomountainman

The best place to buy tire chains is in the southern US. All those northerners retire down here (southern Nevada where we are right now) and after a couple of winters sell their tire chains for rock-bottom prices at yard sales! I love it. I bought two more sets of chains last year paying about ten percent of what they'd cost back home in MT.


----------



## mojo4

I have a set but they are crappie. Every spring I try to remember to get a good set on the closeout discount sales. Maybe next month or two I will remember!! I don't put chairs on all 4 tires just the front two. With the weight of the engine I always found that the rear two weren't necessary. 

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Survival Forum mobile app


----------



## Sentry18

I have something like a snow chain, I believe they are called Spikes or Spiders or something like that. They go on easier, or at least they seemed to the 1-2 times I have used them. I also keep kitty litter and a small shovel in the car.


----------



## goshengirl

Sentry18 said:


> I also keep kitty litter and a small shovel in the car.


We've used A LOT of kitty litter this past week!


----------



## Caribou

I haven't had chains for years. Four wheel drive and great snow tires do the job for me. The only time I have a problem is when I get high centered and chains have never helped me there. I keep a folding shovel in the car. Also, after over fifty years of driving in the snow and having made most of the mistakes, I'm fairly good at staying out of trouble.


----------



## mosquitomountainman

Caribou said:


> I haven't had chains for years. Four wheel drive and great snow tires do the job for me. The only time I have a problem is when I get high centered and chains have never helped me there. I keep a folding shovel in the car. Also, after over fifty years of driving in the snow and having made most of the mistakes, I'm fairly good at staying out of trouble.


We drive 4wd almost exclusively and have still needed tire chains to get up one hill to our cabin. We get snow then rain then sub-zero cold. The ice was so hard that we sometimes had difficulty even with chains on the rigs.


----------



## Tirediron

MMM just curious, are you using actual chain chains or have you tried Z pattern Cable chains ?? 
I found this while searching out chains,
http://www.scc-chain.com/tire-chain-finder/traction-product-comparisons/


----------



## Caribou

mosquitomountainman said:


> We drive 4wd almost exclusively and have still needed tire chains to get up one hill to our cabin. We get snow then rain then sub-zero cold. The ice was so hard that we sometimes had difficulty even with chains on the rigs.


My tires have a softer rubber with an aggressive snow tread and are heavily siped. This gives me a year around tire that will out perform studs. These tires and my 4WD seem to work better than most others on the road.

I do not mean to discount the usefulness of chains but the question was, who has chains and I don't. Depending on the car, the driver, the tires, and the road chains may well be the best answer. If I am ever invited to your BOL in the winter I will bow to your experience and bring a set of chains along though my pride will probably require that I try your hill without them first.


----------



## Tirediron

the snipped tires definitely work, I have Finnish ice/ snow tires on the front of my dually, but the rears are Uniroyal ultra crappy traction rock hard crap. I want to go up a size to match the rest of our duallies so I am trying to make these last until busy season. If I had the good winter tires all around I might have tempted the hill, pulling the trailer, but the other route out was better and a bit shorter, wish I found it the first day, Still going to carry at least a set of singles though.


----------



## backlash

Schucks auto parts would let you return your tire chains at the end of the winter if you had not used them.
That was their big selling point so I bought and returned them every year until I had to use them once.
State Patrol made me chain up and I was within 100 yards of the top of the pass.
I probably still have a set but I doubt they fit my current truck and I never travel over the pass if it might be bad.


----------



## Turtle

The use of snow chains and/or studs is illegal in the People's Socialist State of Maryland, so I have never used them. In the other states in which I have lived, I have found that my lifted Jeep with Mud Terrains handles just about any amount of snow pretty well. 


Sent from my iPhone using Survival Forum


----------



## lotsoflead

I keep chains on the plow truck and one of the tractors, the rubber snow tires go thru the snow, but it takes the steel to cut the ice.


----------



## cowboyhermit

Tractor tires are great on ice Just last week I watched a forklift in town slide through a 4way stop, tires were locked up for about 100ft before the intersection, luckily nobody was in any danger because it probably never would have dawned on him to lower his load.

Siping/softer rubber of winter tires/studs really do help on ice but not nearly as much benefit in snow as chains are imo. Sometimes a bit of snow on top of the ice plugs the siping right up. For the most part on vehicles we just try to keep really good tires on the critical ones and chains are almost never used. On a tractor or a truck that stays off road though, chains are pretty amazing. We have some "full coverage" chains that are really easy on the power train and the tires, they work great year round and that's a good thing because they are a pain to put on


----------



## Boomy

In "06 while hunting in Co, we noticed that the locals chained their spares on their Jeeps. Swap front drivers tire out and you can pull yourself through to where you are going.
This year when we went back I had my spare chained. Got through some sketchy stuff headed up to our hunting grounds, but never had to swap it.


----------



## NaeKid

Turtle said:


> The use of snow chains and/or studs is illegal in the People's Socialist State of Maryland, so I have never used them. In the other states in which I have lived, I have found that my lifted Jeep with Mud Terrains handles just about any amount of snow pretty well.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Survival Forum


That is sad ...

In the next province over, it is law that all vehicles driving in the winter time must be equipped with winter tires and / or good all-season tires and chains.

I personally love the V-Bar chain - lots of ground-gripping power and they are not too expensive from TireChain.com (http://www.tirechain.com/VBAR.htm) ... I use them when required offroad in the bush .. but they stay tucked into the corner of my Jeep all winter long, even when street-driving. Never know when another massive snow fall is going to begin and trap the majority of the residents around here ...


----------



## mosquitomountainman

Tirediron said:


> MMM just curious, are you using actual chain chains or have you tried Z pattern Cable chains ??
> I found this while searching out chains,
> http://www.scc-chain.com/tire-chain-finder/traction-product-comparisons/


I've seen a few of those but never used them. I should clarify that I've seen pieces of cable chains alongside the road. They were shredded. Cable type chains work okay on level ground with little snow on light vehicles if you don't push them hard. Put them on a truck, heavy snow with a hard layer of ice underneath the snow and a hard grade and they shred pretty quickly.

Caribou: I've used the siped tires, soft rubber, sawdust tires. They all help to a degree and are much better than hard rubber tread. I've had hard tires with studs and they slid all over the place on ice.

We don't need chains all the time but we occasionally get a couple feet of snow then rain which turns it to ice. Then we get a cold front move in where the temps are down to 25 below zero (F) or lower. The ice is so hard that my "V" bar chains on my pickup will barely scratch it. I've seen wreckers chained to trees to hold them while they winched people out. I've seen ice so hard that standard tire chains (no "V" bar, steel studs, etc.) would not hold a vehicle in place if you stopped on a grade.

We had a friend (he died a couple of years ago) who thought he'd plow his road with his D9 cat. He started down his hill with the blade down and the cat started to slide on the ice. His words were that "it was the wildest ride of his life!" The cat stayed upright to the bottom of the hill where it stayed until the ice softened enough in spring to drive it back up to his house.

Our neighbor needed his little Ford Exploder towed to his place. I chained up all four wheels on my truck. It spun out half-way up our hill and dug four neat holes about six inches into the ice (down to the frozen gravel). We backed down the hill and made a run for it. We made it the second time but the truck was spewing ice shavings all over the Exploder.

IMO, the best tire chains are heavy duty chain (buy chains made for trucks ... not cars) with some type of traction aid like steel studs or V-bars. I've broken my strongest chains three times. Twice I had cross links break, once I had the hook holding the ends together break. My son has a snowplowing business and has broken chains a lot of times. I always carry spare chain repair links and extra cross-links. Breaking chains isn't that uncommon in northern Montana.

For the last several years we head south every winter to avoid all that nonsense!


----------



## mosquitomountainman

Caribou said:


> ... If I am ever invited to your BOL in the winter I will bow to your experience and bring a set of chains along though my pride will probably require that I try your hill without them first.


Don't worry about trying the hill first, most of us do it several times each winter. We've all taken some ribbing about the times we didn't make it!

We had one section last winter where our SIL's truck slid backwards into a snow bank. He walked to our place to get me and I slid into his truck on the same hill because I couldn't stop. I got him up the hill (chained up all four wheels that time ... studded tires just couldn't do it by themselves). About an hour later another neighbor who's lived there all her life slid down the same stretch and her dad pulled her out. An hour after that our Kalifornia neighbor slid down the same stretch and hit a tree ... It almost totaled his truck. Every vehicle involved was a four-wheel-drive pickup except for our Cherokee. All had excellent quality winter tires and some had studded tires.

Sometimes the ice is just really hard and slick.


----------



## Tirediron

It certainly depends on the micro climate of an area what type of ice forms, actual thawed water ice is a lot slipperier than packed snow that has a friction melted coating of "ice" which is what we encounter most of the time in our dryer climate. One of the hardest forms of Ice that I have encountered is the mess that forms when road salt melts the snow packed "ice" on a road surface and then the temperature suddenly drops freezing it into a nasty hard layer, that just laughs at the sandivk ice cutting bits on the grader blades


----------



## lotsoflead

UncleJoe said:


> In Pa chains are allowed between Nov. 1 and April 15.


how about studs, they used to give tickets and make people take off the studded tires.


----------



## headhunter

The heaviest chains I've seen were on the trucks that serviced sheep camps around Craig, CO. I've been camping (hunting) back in and wanted to get home, chains are good.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "side slip". You think you're going along great 4 wheel drive lock in and suddenly the back end of your truck is headed down hill. You don't have to be on a sever side slope for it to happen. Without chains you are SOL Even with good sized cleats in your tires, chains will keep you moving without mudding up.
In deep snow you can have your truck in low range and chained up on all four and if you throw a chain, you're either going to have to dig or get your HiLift out to replace it to get going again.
If you end up on a narrow down grade chains in the rear are a comfort.


----------



## Jason

UncleJoe said:


> In Pa chains are allowed between Nov. 1 and April 15.


I just read this thread tonight. The first bunch of posts had me wondering about PA. Thanks!:wave:

And no, I don't have chains. After 10 years+ my Dakota has rusted to pieces so I upgraded last month to a '10 F-150. It has 17" wheels, which seems odd to me. I realize I'm way behind the times but to me a half ton truck rolls on 15's and a 3/4 ton runs on 16's. Do you buy chains based on tire size or are they kind of a one size fits most type of thing?


----------



## mosquitomountainman

Tire size although one chain number will fit several different tire sizes.


----------



## forluvofsmoke

mojo4 said:


> *I don't put chairs on all 4 tires just the front two*. With the weight of the engine I always found that the rear two weren't necessary.
> 
> Sent from my SCH-I535 using Survival Forum mobile app


You may rethink that after you get in a bind and put enough torque on the drive-train to break a u-joint, yolk, or twist a drive-line tube on the front-end. On flatter terrain, and where there is little to no snow/mud depth, front chains may be fine, but in deeper snow, mud, or steep terrain, I'd be hesitant to use chains on the front only. The front drive-lines on most AWDs are noticeably smaller than the rear, unless you've made drive-line modifications, but then you still have weaker differential gears, input shaft and axles up front. Tire chains can spin momentarily, then bite into something solid, and when they do, you'll find that your front drive-line IS usually the weakest link, unless you have a VERY light right foot and quick reaction time. Some owner's manuals even state not to use chains on the front tires, only the rear, as is the case with my Durango. If you do use chains on front, I recommend that you chain-up the rear first, for pulling/braking traction, and only use front chains if more steering traction is needed, but so much for pulling. Above all, remember that speed is not the answer, nor is a heavy foot, especially once chains hit the road...speed destroys chains, spinning chains destroy chains and can provide you with a hair-raising moment when something big breaks, and lastly can result in under-body and fender-lip damage if a chain breaks at speed or high rate of spin.

When you have to throw tire chains as often as I do for as long as I have after 19 years driving 85ft long 60-ton diesel trucks in off-road service with locking inter-axle differential and full locking differentials on both drive axles, you learn to respect your chains, especially mud-service chains (~3X as heavy as highway chains). Highway chains aren't too hard on drive-trains with heavy trucks because they have such small cross chains and side chains, which translates to less overall traction than mud chains. Highway chains will usually break (on rear tires) before drive-train damage occurs, but mud service chains, well, these are drive-train killers. If you need these, you'll wish you were somewhere high and dry, because if you mess-up running mud chains, you're pretty much screwed and looking for "plan B", or broke-down if you pushed your luck too far [translated: too much lead in right boot], costing big bucks to fix major drive-train components after getting towed, that is...there is nothing quite like the feeling you get after you crunch a $4,500 front differential in a 23,000lb axle...it's damn loud, and rather violent.

Before the days of owning my own 4 x 4, I could go places 4 x 4s would shy away from with my 2 wheel drive and chains...however, I had WEIGHT on the rear of that truck. Even a 4 x 4 with chains on the rear will fair much better on icy surfaces with a moderate to heavy load than it will when empty. In mud or on deep, packable snow, a slightly reduced load will suffice. In mud, slow and easy, so the tires and chains can get down into something solid and provide traction...if you're flying across the top at speed, you'll loose steering first, then be sideways in short order, unless you're running in the ruts (if there are any). On slick roads, ruts are your friend...they'll keep you on the road, as long as some clown wasn't busting a$$ and went ditch-running...then you may get sucked right in as well. Take it slow enough and you'll be able to counter-act to avoid it...too fast and you're going for a wild ride. If you encounter deep drifts and it's conditions which are warmer allowing the snow to pack, roll into them slow (2-3 MPH) with light torque (throttle)...as soon as you feel a wheel spin just stop and back up 10 feet or so and roll into it again. As long as you don't spin holes and start digging your way to china, you can pack tracks and stay on top, even with a heavier vehicle. I've done that with 4 dual-wheel drive chains on a 30-ton straight-truck after unhooking my trailer, and was able to negotiate my way through 4-5ft of snow while only dragging the banjo-housings and steering axle, so yes, even with very heavy vehicles, it can be done.

When traction is poor, be PATIENT with your vehicle...the worse the conditions get the more time your tires and chains need to provide the traction to get you there. Don't take a "run" at a slick hill unless you know the road, vehicle and conditions very well...else you may be sliding backwards, sideways, or worse, all the way from near the top of the hill to the bottom, or until you wreck, whichever comes first. When in doubt, start up a hill slow...if you loose traction you won't have as far to come back down the hill. Speaking of slick hills, don't follow someone else up a hill...wait until they are to the top safely, or you may be backing down the hill in a hurry to make way for them if they lost traction ahead of you.

And do keep your chains in good condition...chain repair pliers, spare side chain links, spare cross-chains/hooks, side-chain connectors, etc can be purchased so you can easily repair chains in the field, if needed, and this is a must for me...optional for others, maybe, but if you rely on chains regularly, it would be wise.


----------



## forluvofsmoke

Turtle said:


> _*The use of snow chains and/or studs is illegal in the People's Socialist State of Maryland*_, so I have never used them. In the other states in which I have lived, I have found that my lifted Jeep with Mud Terrains handles just about any amount of snow pretty well.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Survival Forum


That's hilarious!!! But also sad...

We have chain laws here that are pretty cut-and-dried, and for good reason...because we've learned.

All of our current personal vehicles are either AWD or 4x2/4x4 capable. My Durango is an SXT (sport, I guess) with full-time AWD and locking inter-axle differential (transfer-case) with no low range (doesn't need it as low gear in the 5-speed automatic is plenty slow enough for crawling).

Here's WYDOT's take on winter road conditions and chains, tires and vehicle equipment:

www.dot.state.wy.us/home/travel/winter/chain_law.html


----------



## BillS

I've never used tire chains. I think they disappeared around 1970 or so. At least where I live. I checked online. Tire chains are legal in Wisconsin but studded tires aren't.


----------

