Letting the air out of your expensive tyres seems counter intuitive particularly when you have just spent a fair chunk of money on your new flash top shelf rubber!

Let us explain to you why letting your tyres air pressure down will be one of the best upgrades you can do to claw your way further down the track, air is what keeps your tyres round, we all know that, heck you’ve probably known that since you were a young gun riding your pushbike along with flat tyres, its no fun unless they are up to pressure.  So why would you drop your vehicles tyre pressures down? For that very reason, when you are on uneven and soft surfaces a round tyre is one of the worst things you could have to “float” over the viscous surface, where a tyre needs large surface area for additional buoyancy, this is why we let our tyres down.

Generally a tyre will have around a palm width worth of contact area on the surface you are driving on when set to recommended highway pressures, this seems like a lot when you start thinking about it but the main reason your tyres slip when you are off hard road surfaces is because of a combination of soft surfaces and lack of surface area.

So dropping down your tyre pressure is going to do two things, particularly when you are equipped with a solid set of 4WD tyres, whether they are A/T’s or M/T’s by dropping your pressures down to approximately half their typical pressure you gain an additional 200% surface area, turning those aggressive tread patterns into more of a tank track to float over the soft stuff, and with less pressure the tread of your tyre can flex and articulate around small rocks tree roots and anything else you can imagine.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3Sm1co7Ihs[/embedyt]

So now you have a few pretty good reasons to drop your pressures, so how do you do that? We hear you asking, does it involve some special vacuum pump? It’s a lot easier than you might be thinking and with the right gear it takes less than 5 minutes to get your 4WD tyres pressure down to proper 4WD driving pressures.

The missing secret is a purpose built tyre deflator system, there are plenty of different options on the market for a specific purpose of dropping your pressures, starting with the silly screw on style, these are settable to only one pressure and screw onto your tyre valve stem and depress the valve core inside to release air until it hits the pre designated pressure, whilst the operation is simple, these systems present a bit of a limitation in their operation, particularly when you need to drop the air pressures down a little bit extra for extremely soft sand or sloppy mud.

This is where an Adventure Kings Kwiky Tyre Deflator comes in extremely handy, this nifty device fastens to your valve stem and removes your valve core completely contained within its own sealed system, with its integrated gauge and massive dump valve you can release excess pressure from your tyres in complete control and with extreme simplicity the added benefit is the ability to see exactly what pressure you have dropped to allowing you to make notes, for how your 4WD performs, and adjust accordingly for future offroad journeys.

Dropping your tyre pressures down is remarkably easy and one of the best performance mods you can make to get your 4WD further offroad, so don’t hesitate visit one of our camping stores, give us a call on 1800 88 39 64 or jump online to find out more at www.4wdsupacentre.com.au