Winter’s coming…break out the chains

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DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour           al@motorwayamerica.com
 
With the bad economic times the world has faced this year it seems there’s a nostalgic feeling about traditions, rituals, habits, what have you. For instance, freshmen attending a university wait the time they can pledge a fraternity that will in some ways be a rite of passage from academia as leaving home was to go to college in the first place.
 
All these things are fine, but when it comes to auto-related tradition few examples carry more nostalgia than tire chains.
 
No, I’m not high. It’s just this time of year, when the temperatures turn fall-like, the leaves are turning beautiful shades of red, orange and yellow and the wonderful scent of burning fireplace logs and leaf burning permeates the senses that I look back on my youth as a small Hoosier.
 
I’ve mentioned many times that my family owned junkyards when I was a kid. They weren’t automotive recycling centers back then, they were junkyards! In October and November we would get dozens or more customers per day who wanted to buy tire chains in preparation for winter driving. We had them by the ton (literally) and sales were brisk.
 
In Northwest Indiana we were constantly subjected to lake-effect snow — and with the resultant moisture the roads were often treacherously slippery and dangerous from the inevitable ice. Slap some chains on your rear tires (there wasn’t such a thing as front-wheel drive in those days) and you stood a fighting chance of not having to call my dad to come by with a tow truck and drag you out of a ditch.
 
There was also a lovely side-effect of tire-chained vehicles; when the pavement was dry it would sound like hundreds of sleighs driving down the road because of the metal clinking over the concrete. Ah, what halcyon times. As the decades went by and doomsayers roamed the halls of capital buildings the thought became planted in the heads of legislators that tires with snow chains were ruining our planet — starting with our roads.
 
Listening to them you’d swear that huge crater-like chunks were breaking loose at almost every mile because the chains were acting like a grader and tearing up the concrete to the point that each year they had to be repaved. I’m not one for conspiracies (sure I am but for the sake of this story let’s imagine I’m telling the truth) but I believe it was around this same period in time that the major tire manufacturers were developing specialty tires for snow, rain, ice and other seasonal ailments.
 
At the time same, studded tires became the rage. They’d generally go on in the late-fall and swap out with regular tires around mid-spring. They weren’t as effective as tire chains but they did offer a fighting chance by having their little steel tips dig into the concrete and provide some traction. However, just like the chain gang, studded tires also became verboten. The mantra was, “Poke holes in your brother-in-law’s story of why he can’t find a job just don’t poke holes on our highways.”
 
In neither instance do I recall major, or even minor permanent damage being done to concrete slabs. Maybe it was because road construction was so much better back then; maybe when roads did require patching it was done more professionally than to have some highway workers throwing shovels full of blacktop into a tire-eating hole and depending on the kindness of drivers to tamp it down as they drive over it; maybe because there was relatively little traffic back then; or maybe it’s because there are now trucks — particularly in Michigan — that are 42-wheelers and loaded with gravel.
 
With all the technology and engineers we have there surely could be some compromise made where tire chains could be concrete-friendly, thus killing (pardon the pun) two birds with one stone. Maybe we can learn to alter the weather so we don’t have snowstorms anymore. There would be no need for tire chains or even specialty tires.
 
Then some day in the future I could write a rant waxing nostalgic about the Bridgestone Blizzak tires, a winter tire that was so good it was banned for the hell of it.