See how we choose oversized All Terrain tires for overlanding in our 2021 LTV Wonder RTB B+ RV built on a 2020 Ford Transit 350 HD cutaway van with rear drive dully wheels.
Welcome to b-plus overland where we share with you all of the upgrades and changes we’ve made to rb plus rv for full-time off-grid living and a trip down the pan-american highway from alaska to argentina ours is a 2021 ltv wonder rear twin bed that’s the b plus in the back and it’s built upon a 2020 ford transit 350 hd cutaway van with rear dually wheels come check
It out today i’m going to share with you how we upgraded our factory radial road tires to all-terrain tires we were trying to achieve four things uh firstly we wanted a more durable tire uh number two we wanted uh better traction number three we wanted a higher load rating or load carrying capacity tire and number four we wanted a larger tire both in width and in
Circumference some of the challenges we ran into uh when trying to select or find a all-terrain tire uh were well number one the big one was this is the new 2020 uh ford transit uh i’ve got the dually wheels in the back it’s the 350 hd it came with a new tire size which wasn’t really popular it was a 205 75 r16 and uh with this being a new uh tire size and a new
Transit body there just weren’t a lot of people or i couldn’t find any who had done any upgrades and i could use their information and again because this is a dually in the back i’m challenged by how wide i can make the tires because the dualies can’t rub or that’s going to cause a tire problem and that applies even when you air down when you’re off-road which
Is kind of limited again because they’re dualies and you don’t want them to rub so you can only down down there so far and then in the front area what size tire was going to fit inside of the well was i going to have to trim things so after doing as much research as i could talking to as many people tire shops taking as many measurements as i could and comparing
Tires i finally had to pull the trigger on what i thought was a safe choice what i started with was a standard road radial tire it was a 205 75 r16 what i ended up choosing was a toyo open country 3 all-terrain tire and the size was a 215 85 r16 so what were my gains there um number one uh traction uh i’d gone to uh the knobby if you will of an all-terrain tire
So i had more grip i’d move from a 205 width to a 215 so i had a little bit more surface area in terms of width and this was also a rated as actual snow tires for severe snow service so if i found myself in canada or alaska during snow tire season and i got pulled over i would have qualifying tires for any kind of weather in terms of higher load i went from a
Load rating a single tire of 113 and dually’s 111 and i went up to a rating of let’s see 115 and 112. so i moved up into a e-rated tire and i gained throughout the total vehicle capacity an extra 600 pounds of carrying capacity so just a little safety factor in terms of lift i ended up as i explained with a wider tire but i ended up with a larger diameter or
Circumference so i went from a 28.1 inch diameter tire down up to a 30.4 so that’s uh 2.3 inches larger overall and in terms of lift i just half that and i got 1.15 inches of additional body lift off you know away from the ground in addition to the lift kit that i had already installed in terms of durability i’m looking at a slightly harder rubber that’s going to
Last longer i’ve got more steel belts in there and i’ve got a much tougher sidewall which is pretty important if i get a puncture in the in the tire i have a plug kit and i can plug it and blow it back up and get down the road but if i end up with a sidewall slice that can’t be repaired that tire’s history so having a more durable side sidewall was pretty a pretty
Nice game in terms of tire safety and repair uh we do use a tpms system a tire pressure monitoring system which i highly recommend and i’ll go into in another video um in terms of spare tires rb plus didn’t come with a spare nor any place to keep one um you talk to most overlanders and you talk about spares and it’s the question is number one are you carrying one
Or two well in our case and this is just the decision we made for us i’m not saying it’s ready for you we chose not to bring a spare so if we do have an issue a flat first our tpms system is going to let us know if it’s a slow leak or a rapid one we need to pull over very quickly that can help save a tire and keep it repairable if it’s a hole in the tread i have
A full plug kit we have a abs compressor on board air so we can reinflate tires when we’ve repaired them or if we’ve aired down if we have a catastrophic failure like a sidewall slice or puncture and we can’t repair it well we don’t have the perfect solution but it gets us to where we can get the tire replaced so with our hydraulic leveling system we can lift
One two or all tires off the ground so we we can get the tires off i have i carry an oversized tire iron and if i have a front tire failure i can remove the front tire i can go to the back and grab one of the dualies bring it forward and put it on and run with a single on that side of the rear and just stick the uh the dane the damaged tire inside and we can
Limp to the next town uh with the higher rated tires that i now have and the weight calculations that i’ve done i can i’m not going to drive 90 miles an hour hour but i can certainly drive 40 50 miles an hour on a semi-smooth road and get us back where we can get some help the other thing to remember is this is a b-plus we’re heavy we’re not like a jeep with
Four-wheel drive and dual lockers that’s going way way out away from the main roads we get out there uh but we’re not um completely out of touch so if we were in a situation without a spare tire that we couldn’t get out of we’re not too far from help so what happens when you change the diameter or circumference of tires on a vehicle that’s very much controlled by
Computers well it confuses it um so once we put these uh bigger tires on um the lane assist didn’t work the crash assist wasn’t working uh cruise control didn’t work the speedometer was off all these alarms red lights were flashing we had to keep turning them off it was obnoxious to drive any distance with these things uh constantly cycling and warning us so um
I did know that i’d have to do some reprogramming i knew i was going to use what seemed to be the only source solution was a program called forescan 4scan.org open source i believe program and i downloaded the free version and did a little more reading than i had initially i realized i had to buy a license to get access to the things i needed to reprogram which
Uh one year license for the unlimited version was only 12 bucks so um also we’re pc not pc based we’re mac based and this program only works on windows so we had to borrow a laptop so borrowed a laptop downloaded the program bought the license and now i need to hook it to the car i purchased the interface the odb obd interface that they recommend this is a odb
Link xl this in plugs into the van computer underneath the driver’s dash and this end plugs into the laptop make sure you buy their recommended one i did read on forums people trying to use other brands and they were very frustrated these are 59 bucks and well worth the investment so i followed the uh instructions on the uh on the four scan website and i went
In to change the code that tells the computer what size wheels you have on the stock code was 3146 uh using the spreadsheet that forescan recommends and by the way their their forum and all their help sites i recommend reading in in those areas and learning about this before you you actually start to do the reprogramming um there’s lots of good information but
Following the instructions after i did the reading i changed that code to 0929 which was what they recommended i went out and did the test drive and nothing worked the alarms for the lane assist were going off alarms for the for the crash control prevention the speedometer didn’t work and they didn’t make any difference so i went in and they have a spreadsheet
Where you can fine-tune these codes you put in over a measured mile what your actual speed over land was you can use a downloadable gps app on your phone which is what i did so you put in that number what the readout on your speedometer says uh and the code that you’re using that they recommended and they tweak the code and then you enter the new tweaked code and
Fine-tune it and then go out and do the uh the drive test i did the drive test multiple times it didn’t solve anything so i was i was a little worried especially since the tires were already on so they had a second approach so i i set that setting back to the factory setting of the 3146 and i just went into a different field where you can manipulate only the
Tire circumference so i changed the stock tire circumference from uh let’s see 2170 millimeters to 24 23 millimeters and uh followed the instructions which included clearing a thing called the dtcs and uh also ran a thing where they it’s called a relearn and the what happens is this new value you’ve put in is propagated to other formulas in the computer and
Those are all corrected so after all i did i did all that i unplugged i went out and did the field test and none of the alarms went off the the lane assist works um the crash avoidance worked uh the cruise control work unfortunately uh the speedometer still was off so um it was off uh such that uh when i was when it said 60 i would actually be going 64. it had
A error percentage of uh 6.6 so i’ve never been able to fix that i don’t know what’s causing it but quite frankly we’re to the point where we just know to keep it you know a few miles an hour uh less uh whether we’re in miles an hour or kilometers and you know if we found the solution to fixing it we’d fix it but it’s not a big deal so so these are our toyos
Installed after about 15 000 miles you can see we haven’t had to do any trimming with these larger diameter tires got a pretty aggressive tread on these compared to our our radial tires and i’ll take you to the back and you can see what the dualies look like okay so these are the toyo all terrains installed on the rear dualies again didn’t have any body
Rub issues and then in terms of spacing between the tires these are at full inflation 80 pounds and you can see that we’ve got a good amount of space and allows us to uh down air when we’re off-road to about 50 pounds maybe a little less so last thoughts on this upgrade am i happy really happy uh didn’t have to make any alterations uh to anything on the van i
Was able to go to a standard tire shop and buy these have them installed the wear has been good now noise going to an all-terrain from a regular road radial tire what’s the extra noise like is it noticeable yes is it a big deal it’s it’s not uh it’s it’s um not even close to the sound of the wind rushing over uh the cowling of the of the van so that’s how little
Difference there is uh in terms of handling on the road going down the highway they they track straight they they corner well i just don’t feel any difference there off-road i definitely have a lot more confidence and i’d highly recommend these for this application
Transcribed from video
Upgrading to A/T Tires – 2020 Ford Transit 350 HD, 2021 LTV Wonder RTB By B+ Overland