andecase

Has anyone ever heard or seen of someone running helium in tires? I figure it's prolly not the best cause it's not popular. I was thinking about it and the only thing I can think of is you would have to refill your tires allot, and price. Any thoughts?

wiggles

Why? Regular air is free and does the job just fine

BuckH

Yeah what's the objective in doing this? Less weight?

rawk krawler

To make it difficult to refill your tires when your done wheelin haha

DieselD

Your tires will sound high pitched until you air down.

CoastieShep

Pretty sure helium molecules are smaller than air, so it would leak out faster than air.

tmj91

So that you can float. Duh.

5-90

Lots of work and expense for no practical gain. Helium is a "trace" component in atmospheric gas, and is usually priced accordingly (in industrial amounts.) You also can't really store it in liquid form - so you're stuck using it from pressure bottles (how much pressure depends on how much helium you need and how much space you have for it. The balloon bottles you get at the party store are probably 20-30 atm, and industrial tank is going to be 250-300bar or so. Helium liquefies at ~0.5K - and doesn't liquefy in the face of increased pressure as LPG and CO2 will.)

There's really no point. In fact, I still have difficulty understanding why people would want to run nitrogen in road tyres - for a racer? Certainly. Street vehicle? Extra work for no real effort, I'd rather run CO2 from a non-syphon tank (so I don't shoot liquid CO2 into the tyre - causing either a cold brittle spot or blowing the bead from the liquid expanding. Or both.)

At least CO2 is easy to get (carbonics, cryo supply, industrial gas supply, paintball supply,) and you''re not "contaminating the system" anywhere near as badly as you are if you top up with compressed air - like you'd get with running nitrogen in your tyres...

Interesting idea - but put it aside and work on something else. Save yourself the trouble...

caged

exactly

andecase

Thank you, that's pretty much what I was looking for. I figured their was a reason why it wasn't used, just didn't know why, and I like to know these thing. If i can find something to get an edge i would like to use it.

andecase

In theory, it would drop the weight of the tires increasing performance and mileage.

andecase

Why do we by lifts and other mods? To increase the performance of our vehicles.

motorcharge

There's nothing that's going to work better than air in your tires. Even nitrogen is pointless, it's expensive, a pain to find in a pinch, and if you end up having to add air to it it destroys the little positive aspects it brings.

hankthetank

why nitrogen

i don't think nitrogen is pointless...

xjfirefighter

I go wheeling quite often and the amount if times I air down and up its not practical to use nitrogen regardless of it's bebefits