Winnebago EKKO l All-TERRAIN TIRE UPGRADE & REVIEW l NO MODS REQUIRED
Upgraded our Winnebago EKKO tires. No Mods Needed. We went from a stock/OE equipped , 205/75/16 Hankook tire, to a 225/75/16 FALKEN WILDPEAK AT3W tire. 300 miles into the journey with our new tires, includes multiple weather conditions and terrain. We are 100% satisfied with the performance and ride quality!
Foreign hey welcome back y’all jason and michelle here echo nesters and we got bad betty with us bad betty is our 2022 winnebago echo she is built on a ford transit all-wheel drive chassis those have been following along with us and subscribing to the channel are familiar with some of the upgrades bad betty has uh has gone through or that we’ve done and those
Are just now looking at our videos we’re going to hope that you’re subscribing and that the information that we have can help you make informative decisions and or just learn something and at the same point you’re leaving us comments maybe you can teach us something as well definitely looking for more knowledge on our own as well so without further ado bad betty
Sitting here as you can see probably looks a little bit more different than you might expect stock out of a winnebago echo so we’ll start with the ford raptor grill we noticed that freedom van gogh was carrying these they ran them on their rigs loved it went ahead and made the order brought it in and we’re completely satisfied with it direct fit good quality i
Can say that was an automotive industry for about 15 years and you can tend to tell what’s garbage and what’s not top of the line piece here excellent quality second thing you see here is this big recovery package right here this is by ca tuned off-road out of california those that are familiar with some of the van life stuff and upgrades that are going on you’ll
Notice that these are all over the sprinter market mercedes sprinters i mean i see them going up and down the road well i started saying you know what could we do here that would look sexy if you will really good on bad betty and so i contacted ca tuned they were in the final development of this for the ford transit chassis so we drove on down met with max and
The team that’s in one of our videos finalize the r d on it got her bolted on and we couldn’t be more happy it’s also accompanied with the 12k or 12 000 pound worn winch as you see here and we’ve got the mad max d shackles we’ll talk more about this whole recovery package probably in another video the other thing you might notice if you’re familiar is bad betty
Seems like she’s sitting a little bit more off the ground in stock and you’re absolutely right bad betty also went undergoed i should say underwent a suspension upgrade it’s a van compass suspension upgrade i like to call it the topo 2.0 and that kit includes as you can see here a front spring a couple other goodies that go in here and some brackets but just
Summarize we stayed with the stock strut assembly you can upgrade to a bilstein there’s a lot of conversation on that i’m not going to get into it right now but there are folks running it i’m sure you can find lots of video on that also as part of the package it has the adjustable falcon rear shocks it’s going to be a little hard to see inside there but maybe
Michelle can get just a sneak peek there um we love the whole package we immediately through going through some of the settings and playing with it found what spoke to us much more stable everything about it was exactly what they said so my hats go off to uh van compass for this kit well engineered so this video is really about tires and as you notice here these
Have a much more aggressive look than what would have come on here so we’ll take a step back and talk about what did bad betty slash the ford transit with the winnebago echo come with what came with a 205 75 16. i call it an all-weather all-season tire it was size load rated for the vehicle met all the manufacturers specifications everything was fine with it we
Rode that tire for a while um didn’t have any real complaints but we wanted something a little different and more aggressive for our needs and kind of talking about what our needs are this tire is capable of doing more than we’re probably going to get into but mostly we live in oregon and in oregon we get a lot of rain in the winters we can get anything from
Snow ice different things happening we travel i-84 quite a bit that’s interstate 84 and those familiar you’re going through hood river the dows and you’re headed east in the winter you can get a immediate change in temperature snow ice lots of rain and so we needed a tire that could manage those conditions for us because that’s a lot of what we do we also wanted
A tire as i said earlier that had more aggressive stance and look in one of the upsized it now this tire happens to be a 225 75 16. you can see that marking right here we’ll get more into what that aspect ratio in that that size means but i want to talk a little bit more about the technology of the tire without kind of getting too boring it has an aggressive lug
Pattern as you can see here designed for this all-terrain it’s continuous sipes they’re actually true deep sipes those sipes right there and we’ll get into that are going to help in controlling things on wet pavement etc the other thing that you might notice about had betty’s tire upgrade is that there’s a bunch of other markings on here i mean obviously we got
The brand name says it’s the wild peak at all terrain then we got at3w all-terrain 3ws that w times 3 if you will has to do with falcon saying this tire is not only good in wet but different weather and it’s got an excellent wear pattern when i say wear pattern and life they say 55 000 miles out of this tire i believe them of course road conditions how you rotate
Keeping proper air is going to have a lot of factors on that we’re probably not going to keep the tire 55 000 miles we’ll begin to change go with newer upgrades but i’m confident in the technology of this tire now i have other tires i want to just kind of throw that out there i have some ko2s on another rig i love them they’re doing everything they’re supposed
To do a little bit more noisy but i can’t say it’s an apples to apples comparison because they’re two different rigs the other one on our sprinter that we have is the han kook it was a dynapro a t and that’s been a great tire for that sprinter it’s rated just like this it’s a 10 ply it’s e-rated and you’ll notice down here we might as well talk a little bit
About that right now they have a load range here e that basically means that this tire is a 10 ply tire and as you do your research and you’re talking with the folks that maybe selling you a tire if you’re going to buy them online you just want to make sure that that rating is there that load rating for this vehicle you’ll also notice in here that we got a 115
112 rating that is also a load index rating we can talk more about that later i would say i was on the internet and tire rack has an excellent chart that you can download look at it’s a pdf as well print it and learn everything probably that you’d ever want to know and not know about that but again most importantly load index e-rated 10 ply tire critical for a
Vehicle this size these are about 11 000 gbw now let’s talk about 205 versus 225 the 75 number and the 16 number when we take this number whether it’s 225 or 205 that’s 225 millimeters of width from here to here that’s the width of the tire the 75 right there is the sidewall ratio if you will aspect so that means that this is 75 of this number here 225 which
Again would apply if you had a 205 75 so this tire obviously is going to gain height based on the fact that this number the 225 is greater i hope that kind of made sense but again we can break it down i can include little links etc 16 is the diameter of the wheel and the diameter of the tire that’s going to fit some of the other things when you’re looking at
Tires is look for some of the technology that not only has to do with the sipe the all-terrain weather conditions that you’re going to be going through but also this little rim or ridge that you see here believe it or not that’s just not there for looks it’s actually a cooling feature designed for this tire and again you can learn more about that stuff so again
We wanted something with a little bit more aggressive look we wanted to get some height out of the tire but more importantly what i was looking to accomplish for us is what could we put on here without making a bunch of modifications so let’s say that we went with uh 245 75 16 tire which has been done uh it’s out there there’s nothing wrong with doing it what
Would that mean well as that tire increases in its width we might come into some areas where we’ve got the pinch seam right here and you could trim that lots of folks do it i’ve done it in the past on other vehicles doesn’t bother me it’s not a concern the other thing to keep in mind is on duallys as you continue to increase the width of the tire meaning we’re
Making this number right here the 225 continued to climb and this number let’s just say stays the same for our height as that tire gets wider somewhere in here these tires might touch now i’ve got my hand all the way in between there i got pretty fat fingers so that should give you some clue so you don’t want those tires getting close together they could chafe
They start to chafe they create wear there’s friction you could have a blowout now how do you get around that there’s spacers that they develop for these they’re out there they work well lots of folks are using them i almost went that route i can’t say i didn’t go that route for any bad reason i was just looking like how can we set bad betty up in a way that if
Somebody had the same vehicle they could do this i have some experience going through it and maybe i could answer some questions and they don’t have to be nervous about spacers i was in the automotive industry for over 15 years during suspension and tuning upgrades a bunch of stuff we use wheel spacers all the time and had no issues with them obviously i’m sure
You can make a mistake get a poor quality one something could go wrong but my experience has been positive as a matter of fact i think grant wilson at freedom van gogh kind of shares with people what they’ve used the brand they use why they’re using them his experience he’s got tons more knowledge than me but he’s ran several of these rigs he’s got a new project
Vehicle out there so if you’re looking to really push some extremes again just giving them a plug freedom van gogh you can learn a lot i get a lot of info from their team as well so back to our tires so show and i what do we do with our vehicle we go to the beach we get out there in the sand we don’t get too crazy we like to go camping we like to get out in
The let’s call it the terrain we definitely love eastern oregon and the train that you see here we just happen to be at a harvest host site here just outside of walla walla on our way to pullman and to see the palouse falls so these tires and the way we have it set up spoke to our our lifestyle now you can get a tire that is a let’s call it an all-season tire
It’s going to do well in most conditions the thing that i would be careful about is not getting confused necessarily with hey it’s an all-season tire i can get out there and i can jam into the snow and boy howdy everything’s going to be great i’ve got an all-wheel drive you know what’s stopping me you need to be careful on that because mud and snow three peak
Mountain symbol similar but different also one of the things that we got when we started posting some pictures of this was questions about road noise and how’s it handling and what did we get so we’ve gone about 300 miles on these so far plus minus we hit i-84 we started going east lots of wind hit some rain lots of semis and i have to say and i’m gonna let
Michelle chime in here in a moment but not only did this thing ride well track well i couldn’t even tell you that i hit a puddle in the water a rut in the road rain had zero effect but michelle and i were cruising down the road and there’s a particular area on i-84 where would you say it gets noisy rattles a little yeah rattle shake we hear a lot of road noise
And we were literally driving down the road and realized how quiet it was and i’m thinking why is this so quiet i’ve got these knobby tires all terrain tires in theory this is supposed to be louder um something doesn’t seem right so we did a quick little video on our instagram i believe where we just kind of listened now we didn’t have a decibel meter so there’s
No science that i’m trying to prove here but i’d say this these are quieter tires than our hand kooks i yep i don’t know why doesn’t make sense but i was shocked and surprised we were able to have a different conversation in here i know some people have said man it’s noisy in the cab there’s a lot of folks trying to figure out how to quiet them down and add
Insulation the reality is you got a van cap here somebody put a box on it this thing’s probably going to be a little noisy overall they’ve done the best that they can in theory of insulating the floor getting up into the cab area there i mean the list kind of goes on i probably wouldn’t tear the whole inside apart i know we’re kind of drifting here but we’re still
Talking about road noise the tires there’s not much you’re going to get around there’s wiring harnesses in there i think the whole day adventure is just not worth it my opinion only though but if you find something different share it i’d love to know so as you walk around bad betty again i think she’s looking good van compass lift we’ve got the wild peak falcon
Tires here lots of brands out there like i said do your own research we’ve got our ca tune recovery package raptor grill we got an oil separation cannon here we’re going to be doing some other mods to the inside that we hope to share with you if you have any questions you got comments you got ideas something you share with us please do leave those comments talk
To us we’re very approachable i’d like to think and looking forward to sharing some other stuff with you so stay tuned for bad betty she’s going to continue to have good adventures and hopefully you can share them with us thanks for joining us hey everyone we wanted to drop this in the middle of our tire review we are on i-84 headed east this is a pretty typical
Route for us it’s just coming out of the gorge we’ve left portland we’re headed towards walla walla washington michelle’s going to give you an idea deep road looks like you can see it’s pretty windy out here this road is not perfect there’s nothing great about the pavement here we’re cruising at 60 miles an hour and the reason i wanted to interrupt it here is
I’m going to silence down here in a moment but shaw and i were just driving along and we just really realized there’s a crazy improvement with these tires again we went from the 205 75 16 hand coops that come stock on the 2022 winnebago echoes and we upgraded to the falcon wild peak at3s which is a 225 75 16. we’re going to get into more details about that more
Aggressive tire a lot of different things going on here but what i would have expected is that tire would have been a little bit noisy we would have felt more of the road complete opposite has just happened we’re cruising along we’re in the cab here and it’s pretty quiet so i’m going to silence down as michelle drifts the phone around and see what you pick up
And notice well there you go we don’t have a decimal meter obviously hooked up you’re just gonna have to trust the audio but those who have one of these those that are familiar you’re going to know that typically this cap is pretty noisy now it’s not so that’s just one of the many things that we notice that we’re loving about the new tires i got a ton more to
Share and just for the record we’re not sponsored by any particular tire company this was just a michelle and i made after doing some research so stay tuned for the rest well here we go bad betty’s about to go get her surprise she’ll come back just looking good there you go bad betty you’re in the doctor’s hands foreign she’s about to go in
Transcribed from video
Winnebago EKKO l All-TERRAIN TIRE UPGRADE & REVIEW l NO MODS REQUIRED By E K K O n e s t e r s
