Monday, August 13, 2012

"All-Terrain Tires" for My Metal Stabilizer Pads


Not too long ago, we were boondocking, and our campsite was rocky.  One of the four metal stabilizer pads came down on a fairly slick piece of granite.  I noticed that the metal pad sitting on the rock jiggled and slipped a little bit, unlike the other three metal pads that were all sitting on dirt.  So it occurred to me that if the metal pad had had a rubber coating, it wouldn't have jiggled on the slick rock.

When I got home, I unscrewed one of the metal stabilizer pads and realized that it isn't flat – there is a flange or rim around the outside edge roughly an inch wide, with a cutout in the middle.  So only the rim makes contact with the ground.  I figured that I could add a piece of rubber to that rim as an "all-terrain tire" for the pads.  

I remembered that I had a piece of hard rubber sheeting stashed away in the rafters in my garage – it's less than a quarter inch thick, but more than an eighth of an inch.  (And it's blue, for some unknown reason.)  I traced the outline of the metal pad onto the rubber and then sketched in the inside curvature of the rim.  I cut out the rim pads in two separate pieces for each unit and then glued them onto the rims with gorilla glue.

In the photo below, you can see the bare metal rim, the two semicircles, and the final product:


I have no idea if these pads will really make much of a difference, but I don't think they'll do any harm, and it was an easy project. 

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