OT? Weigh your car by checking tire pressure?

Sigh. Like you would know 'anything' about anyone else being retarded, Morph Meister. Your second grade insults and constant errors in your posts prove that you've been brain dead for years. You are just too stupid to finish the job, and drop dead.

You don't even have to post for people to see how much brain rot you've suffered. There is nothing on Usenet that is any more boring than you and your kook minions. Grow up and get a life, or take the easy way out by investing in a single bullet, and play Russian Roulette till you 'win'.

Very true, Morph Meister. The first honest thing that you have ever said.

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I'd love to see the math on that one......

On a 4800 pound car with equally distributed wheel weights (1200 pounds at each wheel) at 30 p.s.i. tire pressure, you would need a contact patch that is 40 in² to support that weight.

In order to have an 8.7" long contact patch at 30 p.s.i., you would have a contact patch that is only 4.59" wide.

Most of today's tire treads are much wider than that.....

I think you are confusing terms.......

Contact patch LENGTH is measured front-to-back - parallel with the tread. Contact patch WIDTH is measured side-to-side - across the tread surface.

I'll bet you've never seen a car with a 20" tire radius, either. It was hypothetical. On my gravel drive, I've never tried to measure the length of my contact patches.

I have read that tread flexing causes rolling resistance, but in a car with proper inflation, the flexing must be much less than 26 degrees. I have encountered something possibly more severe hauling gravel in a pickup. When the tires sagged badly I needed engine power to keep moving even downhill.

My bad, I wasn't specific about "edge". I meant the front and back edges of the footprint, not the side edges. By "effectively round" I meant the appearance of the tire from the side, not its appearance from the front or back.

I agree, a properly inflated tire should look essentially flat from side to side where it touches the road as seen from the front or back (_) ; but seen from the side, there will be regions at the front and back of the footprint where the tire just touches the road, tapering towards the full-contact region. This will be more pronounced if the tire is over-inflated, and will approach triviality as the tire approaches squishing flat.

When a tire looks like (_) from the side, you're in trouble.

But not very much trouble. After all, it's only the bottom bit that's broken - the rest of the tyre is fine.