A bit of a delay in getting more of my family trip from my home town of Apsley to Perth via Darwin and a few places in between due to no or very limited mobile coverage . We are home now after 16000 ks 15500 of them with left hand rear strut blown and 1 slow leak in the same tyre on the last few days . The strut did not affect the ride or handling to much except that it was a bit noisy on corrugations and caused increased tyre wear especially on the rough dirt roads of which we traveled at least 2000 k . The dirt roads we traveled on varied from beef roads with little maintainance used by road trains carting cattle, station access roads , roads used by road trains carting ore that were so well maitained that 100kph was possible and othe roads that were somewere in between .
This is the start of Duncan Highway a beef road that originaly serviced cattle stations between Halls Creek and the port of whyndam ,this is the unsealed section about 440ks with no services and little maintaince road surface varies from gravel ,rocks,foot deep bull dust or dirt ,camped at along the way ,we camped for 2 days with no other campers ,also caught fish in the creek .Only saw 2 other vechicles and 2 road trains along the entire track

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These back roads give the car a hammering. I ran the tyres at 25 PSI. My ARB gauge is actually 2 PSI higher than what the gauge says. All my digital gauges will show 27 PSI.

I also helped pump up a camper on a truck chassis to speed things up, their tyres run at 55 PSI, they had a calibrated professional gauge, but only a single compressor. A Good opportunity to check my gauges!

Looks like you have 17 inch rims instead of the poodle 18 inch rims I have. Procrastination, mankind's greatest labour saving device!

Acoustic insulation ARB TPMS 3xARB air compressors After cooler Air tank On-board OCD pressure air/water cleaning Additional 50L fuel Carpet in doors ABE 2x1kg Waeco 28L modified fridge Battery 4x26ah Solar 120w Victron MPPT 100/20 DC-DC 18amps 175amp jumper plug Awning 6x255/60R18

They are 17 inch with yokohama geolanders I run them at 40 psi and the camper at 32 the main reason for the wear was the blown strut as I kept rotating the tyres to keep the wear even although after a couple of hundred ks on the roads with rocks you cold see that the rats had been at all of them .

I run 34 on the bitumen, so they are around 39 once up to temperature. Add about 1 PSI for the sunny side & about 1 PSI less for the shadow side. Running at 25 on the corrugated roads they heat up to about 29.

Agree, looks like rats eat the tyres! Procrastination, mankind's greatest labour saving device!

Acoustic insulation ARB TPMS 3xARB air compressors After cooler Air tank On-board OCD pressure air/water cleaning Additional 50L fuel Carpet in doors ABE 2x1kg Waeco 28L modified fridge Battery 4x26ah Solar 120w Victron MPPT 100/20 DC-DC 18amps 175amp jumper plug Awning 6x255/60R18

Geez, 40psi on corrugations would kill the suspension with no cushioning help from the tyres. I run 32-34 on the tar and around 25 on gravel/corrugations. Never had a suspension issue in 303,000 kms on some of the roughest roads there are. A lot more comfortable too.

The National Park sign at the entrance of Purnululu says 'Reduce tyre pressure 10psi from normal highway pressure' The corrugations on the first 12 km are not the worst I've been on.

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Interesting comments on tyre pressures .most of the unsealed roads We traveled on were rough but not corrugated 'The reason I use the higher pressures is that many years ago We traveled to Cape York in a series 2a swb and found that the ride was pretty bad so I dropped the pressure from 40psi to 28-30 psi and the ride did not change but started to get punctures (4 in one day) so I inflated tyres back to 40, ride still bad but no punctures . I had only one spare several new tubes and a puncture kit .Got pretty good at removing and refitting tyres .
Doug

There used to be a nice guy called Adam Plate who ran the Oodnadatta Roadhouse. On my first trip out there, I had to get a few tyres repaired and he gave me a sheet that he produced for travelers concerning the importance of tyre pressures. This is someone who has dealt with more wrecked tyres than can ever been contemplated. I've used his guidelines ever since and found them to be pretty spot on. Sadly, Adam was killed in a rally car accident near Adelaide a few years ago. Still, there are pros and cons for all cases, the important thing is you are out there having a good time and posting pictures for us to enjoy. Cheers.

We have had 3 punctures, all from screws on our trip. The second 2 we caught early enough because we got TPMS after destroying the first tyre.

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