Yeah, I figured it was kind of a professional's only tool. Aren't the stationary professional garage ones a lot lot more though?
Why on earth are people so hung up on filling tires with nitrogen? The diffusion rate is not appreciably different in practice, and you should be checking tire pressures anyway (which vary more with temperature than diffusion). And if your shop air is so wet that you have moisture accumulation in tires, well, you have a bigger problem.... -f
+1 a waste of dough. Use that money for a decent tool box, some starter tools (a set of box wrenches, screwdrivers, sockets, etc). If you have change, by a decent jack and a pair of jack-stands. That will serve you alot better! BR/Brian.
Even if nitrogen made any difference (which it doesnt) this is irrelevent because in order to fill the tires with nitrogen you would need to remove all the air first. This is not possible unless you were to place the entire tire/wheel in a nitrogen filled tank. Its a product based on non-science, the automotive equivalent of oxygen-free cables in the audio world. Total waste of money.
I think the idea is that it's to be used on tires already filled with nitrogen when you need to add pressure. As for how they fill them in the first place I'm not familiar with how that's done. Do they flood the interior of tire with nitrogen from a tank when they're mounting the tire on the rim?
Not here in Kuwait. They mount the tire using regular air, then after it's seated, let the air out and reair the tire up with Nitrogen, all for the low, low price of $3.50 (One Kuwait Dinar) per tire... Waste of money, IMHO. Mike
Someone said it was $850 US!!?? So much for the claim in the ad that it's a "cheap" alternative to using straight compressed air. And this stuff about moisture in compressed air... don't most folks that have compressors also have an in-line filter that traps the moisture? I do, and I'm a total shade tree mechanic. In pro shops, I've always seen a big-arse filter right next to the compressor. So how much water are we talking about? Certainly NOT the swimming pool that the company seems to represent in the ad.
Every time something about nitrogen comes up everyone says the same things. And I say the same thing. At the major auto manufacturer I work at I read an internal report on nitrogen fill. It's true that it permeates less and it oxidizes the internal components of the tire less than shop air. It's also damned near as effective in those functions when it's mixed with 1 bar of air as when it's pure (as I recall they kept filling & emptying until they got something like 97% N2 concentration). P.S.- I don't have nitrogen in my tires and I don't think we use it in the plant. Tires work pretty well with air, but those that say nitrogen is a bunch of BS are ignorant of things like this investigation.
I would be happy to be proved ignorant, so please set me straight: I agree N2 will diffuse out of the tire slower than O2, but the difference in this diffusion rate would need to be measured in a laboratory, as it's too small to be felt or measured with a conventional tire gauge. (Now if you go and spin a small diameter tire with a lightweight, thin casing fast enough to go 220+ mph, and you do this at extreme temperatures, and you do this for an extended length of time, then the small difference in diffusion rate might matter to you....) As for oxidizing the internal components of the tire, this is intriguing: can you explain what components are being oxidized and how this is reducing their life expectancy? Is it the steel wires, the rubber, or ??? Does filling with N2 reduce the risk of failure of these internal components, or does it just maintain optimal performance for a longer time? Do tires filled with air suffer performance degradation because of internal component oxidation? (Do tire manufacturers warn about this?) Please prove me ignorant! Thanks -frank
Normal air is around 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen and 1% mixture of various. In all but certain extreme applications nitrogen useage is snake oil. As has been pointed out, unless you use a compressor that has a tank with high water content then normal air is fine. Decent shops use water traps at a minimum, most use air-driers inline as water also trashes expensive air tools.
Some of the claims made are bordering on fraudulent. On one of the supplier sites they state that using nitrogen will increase tyre life by up to 25% and miles per gallon by 2%. But if you read the small print what they actually mean is that having your tires at the correct pressure brings these benefits, not solely by using nitrogen. They are saying that the tires will remain fully inflated for longer so these so-called benefits are the result. Its total sales bull. For anyone who checks tire pressues at the proper intervals this so-called benefit disappears completely, if it was ever there.
Isn't there oxygen and moisture on the outside of the tire? If it is not a problem there, it should be fine on the inside, too.
They do remove the air first with the ahem..."professional" machines. The first stage is to evacuate the tire using a vac pump as an air conditioning machine does, before they refill with nitrogen. Of course, this is irrelevant as the rest of your post is spot on. Waste of time. Waste of money...
What's the recommended interval? 3years/30K, 5yrs/30K, ............ Oops thought it was ANOTHER belt thread, wrong belts...........
What's inside the tire is pressurized and permeating through the tire. I like 303 protectant to take care of the outside of the tire! http://303products.com/index.php/protectant.html/ Frank Capitalist, let me try to find the report again so I get the details correct, but, my recollection is that it was the bonding of the different layers inside the carcass that benefitted from the N2 fill. It wasn't looked at from a "lap time performance" standpoint, but a durability standpoint where there was concern about catastrophic failures. I had an interesting conversation with the guy (at the awards ceremony where they got a very big corporate recognition for their research), part of what I learned was that off the record, those "replace your tires every x years" recommendations are really for people in hot environments. Ask Firestone about that! OK, here's a report presented by Ford some years ago (I've spot-checked the results section in this clearly biased source with a "pure" source of this same report): http://www.getnitrogen.org/pdf/FordBaldwinResearchRaper.pdf Another nitrogen-specific site http://tirenitrogen.typepad.com/ has a good assortment of reference articles on the left of the page. Note that they attribute Ford's name to two Baldwin papers, but one is after he joined an independent (more influence-able?) failure analysis company. I've heard of Exponent before and thought they were respected, but I'm not active in the hired failure analyst industry so I don't know.
Reports must have been written by people with a load of nitrogen they wished to sell. Utter drivel..... Tire decomposition? Brilliant......
Thanks Don, interesting reading. (But hmmmmm, Ford testing a Goodyear tire commonly installed on SUVs in 2004, and discovering a mechanism that could be used to encourage early failure...!) I've just skimmed it, but here's my favorite parts so far: - "One benefit of using N2 is claimed to be higher air pressure retention because of the lower permeability of N2 than O2 through IIR, NR, and SBR compounds. While this is true in controlled laboratory tests of pressure retention in tires, the benefit to the real world consumer could be somewhat less." - "The characteristic linear volume expansion with temperature because of nitrogen's inherently low water absorption characteristics is no benefit to the average driver because the handling requirements for daily commuting are nowhere near as demanding as for racing; the improvement would be negligible and imperceptible." - "One could infer from the shift factor between air and nitrogen inflation that tires inflated with nitrogen would take twice as long to deteriorate as air inflated tires would. While this may be true at 60°C, the magnitude of improvement may be lessened if the data was shifted down to temperatures that tires operate at normally." - "it is perhaps a fair assumption to say that there would be some improvement in tire durability if nitrogen was used as the inflation media, but it is too soon to speculate as to how much of an improvement it would be." - But even with the above, the paper wraps up with, "The overall conclusion of the study is: When N2 is used as the inflation media, the change in rubber properties is significantly slowed down or even halted." And they go on to discuss how consumers shouldn't fret over the initial 1atm of air in the tire when filling with N2.... It is interesting that an N2 fill may slow tire deterioration when subjected to high temperatures; my question would be how this lab test correlates to real world experience - and real world experience with performance tires (which are considerably different than light truck tires). Does the N2 fill slow deterioration so that road-use tires in hot climates last significantly longer? Track use is potentially more interesting, as their lab test would seem more directly related to track driving (60 degC is HOT): will an N2 fill prevent tires wearing out before the tread (or slick) layer is used up, or are there multiple other mechanisms at work such that an N2 fill won't have any significant effect? (I always figured the cause of tires 'going off' was just from repeated excessive heat cycling; maybe an N2 fill would put an end to this?) Does Ford, or any other manuf, fill tires with N2 at delivery? With the Ford name on this research, they would seem to be creating substantial liability if they don't make use of their own findings...! It's interesting no tire company participated in this research. Presumably they are aware of the issues with air in their tires; then again, if the issues with air are as this report indicates, it also seems the tire maufs could do something really simple about it: a thin nylon barrier lining on the inside of the tire would stop virtually all of the oxygen migration through the tire at effectively zero weight penalty. At this stage in the game, would almost seem a requirement from a liability perspective...! (Seems an enterprising sort of person should come up with a DIY tire lining or paint-on compound that would stop the oxygen diffusion could become a track must-have....) Anyway, thanks; interesting reading. Still seems to me relatively inapplicable for street driving, but track use *might* be justified.... -frank
Frank, it's good to be able to have a real discussion with someone with an open mind, rather than those that have their mind made up and won't consider other information. Look out, nitrogen could get moved into the Politics & Religion section! Rustybits, that means you and your one liners don't seem too convincing compared to the research & data presented in the reports you're pissing all over... I'm certainly not the expert on this subject (that's why I'm not linking to my own publications!) but I think some of the temperature points being made might be related to the nature of the accelerated aging test much of this is based on, in which they've picked some temperatures at which to bake the tires to simulate road usage. Some of their early reports (which might be there in the tech section of that second website I'd linked to) correlated the oven test to tires gathered from the field. Ford was leading the charge on this research at the time because of the Firestone tire issue. These guys could have predicted it with their oven aging test if it had been developed before. The oven test methodology is now being adopted by NHTSA. I don't know that any manufacturers are factory filling with N2 (you might expect a high performance mfr to do so), but one of those pro-N2 sites did say that Volvo fills spares with it. And it makes sense because spares never get checked. Look, I'm not saying N2 is nearly as good as sliced bread, but here's where I see applicability: - Most people don't check their tire pressures. We can all look down our noses at them and say they should, but they don't. Reducing pressure loss means better road safety and reduced fuel consumption that benefits us all - The spare tire thing I just learned about is really smart. I think I might go pay the $2 to get a fill up on mine! - FOR OUR FERRARIS, that don't get much mileage, N2 fill should help keep the tires from coming apart from the inside as they rack up more years. Part of what comes out of this research is that those tire age replacement guidelines that have appeared since Firestone are really for warm climates, but these kinds of things get dumbed down to avoid creating confusion. I'd like to say "There's no rash of tires coming apart on the highways now, so this improvement is all on the margin..." but at the time this research was inspired there WAS a rash of tires coming apart on the highways making the news every night. Tires are all probably better now, so this could reduce the value of N2. I'm also not certain that N2 would have prevented the Firestone problem. I don't know if that's buried in any of this research or not.
