Please review the pictures and patents. As you can see by this Fat Tire Rim/Tire design, we have completely changed what every other fat tire manufacturer is doing. Others allow the tires width to dictate the tires height, where current tires are approximately 110 to 120 mm wide and 100 mm+ in height. This causes two issues:
First, it causes extra weight in the tire giving you additional mass to rotate.
Second, it gives you a large tire tread radius, (the tire has a much greater arch in the tread or it is too round at the tread), which forces you to deflate the tire to get a maximum foot print for soft terrain like sand, mud and snow, and is not as stable of a foot print for downhill racing.
By shortening the tire side walls it changes the tread radius and gives you the same foot print other tires achieve by deflating the tire, while fully inflated, but if deflated you even get a larger footprint. This tire can stay fully inflated, (you may wish to deflate slightly in really soft conditions, but nothing like all the current tires will use), and now you have much less, 2” less, of side wall on each side, better rotational mass, less rotational mass with a larger tire at 4.5” to 5” width, a much better foot print, and a tire which has much greater stability.
The current tire has about 9.5” (or 24.1cm) of total width or tires area. The Diameter of the wheel or tire is about 29.5” or 74.9 cm. That gives the current tires a surface area of about 6.11 sq ft or 5667.9 cm Square. When you take off the 4.5 cm on both sides or 1.77”, this makes these tires have 37.4% less surface area or weight. You could increase the width of the new tire design which is 5” now to 6” and still have over 25% less weight than the current tires have. This is a huge difference in rotational weight, rotational mass, and the speed and acceleration the rider can get out of the new tire compared to the old. These Rim/Tires will beat any other bike in a race with this kind of reduced mass. Not even considering the better tread radius, so the tire can get same traction with no deflation.
By taking the 29ers concept, and making the rims approx. 25” or 64 mm OD Diameter, you have the same OD of the whole tire system as the existing tires have (even about ½” more) and much less mass. The results achieving is the same distance traveled, (if not more) per rotation as the tire is ¼” to ½” taller. The last issue is that all the currently designed holed/lighter rims are not symmetrical, they all have holes missing on the top and bottom on these rims, this will cause issues with rotation as speeds are increased, like downhill racing. We have taken that issue and resolved that as well. These changes solve the issues faced with the Fat Tire Wheel System.
We are currently only using the 29er rim system.