Filling your tires with Nitrogen!!!!

F

Focusedonsound

New member
I was talking to my brother the other day (He's a Tech for Lincoln/Mercury) and he was telling me an intresting fact that they are now using "Nitrogen" to fill tires. No longer Air.. They are saying that Nitrogen provides you with better pressure retention, Better tread ware, and suposedly slows chemical aging.

In any even I thought I would pass on some of this information to the DC ....

Here are a few articals if you are intrested in doing some further reading

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/nascar5.htm

http://www.tirelast.com/id2.html
 
Discount Tire, at least most of them, does this now too. Racers have been doing it for years and years. Some even run them in air filled shocks.
 
zannard said:
I believe they have used nitrogen in aircraft tires forever also.
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It is an Air Force regulation that the aircraft tires be filled with nitrogen. We have this huge self generating nitrogen system in our hangar. It works really well.
 
Fill em with Helium and get 50 MPG


Seriously, as an aircraft tech I can say the benefits to cars of nitrogen are really nothing. Your air is already almost 80% Nitrogen already..... If your compressor has a water separator you have no need for nitrogen, if its free though go for it.
 
I think they use nitrogen so the tires wont explode during flight due to the high altitudes. I may be wrong but i think that would be a good reasoning behind it as well
 
CreativeDesignz said:
I think they use nitrogen so the tires wont explode during flight due to the high altitudes. I may be wrong but i think that would be a good reasoning behind it as well
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Good guess, but thats not it. We were using regular air for 35+ yrs on the aircraft i work on. To my knowledge, we never had a tire explode in the air.
 
I was thinking more along the lines of high altitude air craft. I dont know what kind of planes are in your hangar but i meant like passenger jets and high altitude military planes.
 
CreativeDesignz said:
I was thinking more along the lines of high altitude air craft. I dont know what kind of planes are in your hangar but i meant like passenger jets and high altitude military planes.
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I'm in the military. They arent necessarily high altitude aircraft, but if they need to, they can get up there.
 
The reason we use Nitrogen on jets is air contains moisture which could freeze at altitude and cause flat spotting and possibly blowing of the tires on landing. Also nitrogen is not as affected by temp so the tire pressure remains fairly constant where air would have a larger pressure change depending on outside air temp.Any place we use compressed gas, like a strut on the landing gear we also use Nitrogen, never air. even when I worked with Single engine prop planes we always used nitrogen just as a good practice even if not needed.

The tire stores claim that Nitrogen wont leak as much as air, this is of course BS. While the molecules are larger its negligable and your air already is nearly 80% nitrogen already. If you dont have a water seperator on your compressor, its a good idea though.

Im the kind of guy who would do it anyway but never pay for it, its just not worth it.

Hope this helps
 
I just had a tire repaired at Costco, and found out that Costco has only been using nitrogen to fill their tires for the last 6 months. A nitrogen filled tire is indicated by a green valve stem cap. According to the promotional material that was there, nitrogen molecules are larger than regular air molecules so it has less of a tendency to leak out of the tire. Also, nitrogen has less of a tendency to trap moisture so there are less pressure fluctuations in the tire when it heats up. Looking forward to see how this one tire performs in comparison to the other tires that are filled with regular air.
 
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