Mitsubishi 4WD Club Trev's Tip 20. 

Trev’s Tips

Traction Control

Having lots of recovery tools to extricate your car in a sticky situation is always useful however I’m always mindful of the large amounts of space these tools take up in your car not to mention the extra weight and, in some cases, high costs.  It is for these reasons that I’m always keen to hear of good ideas that avoid some of these problems.  This is just one of those ideas that appeals to me.

When ever your car gets stuck in sand or mud the biggest problem I generally find is that the car will sink so low that the belly will rest on the dirt meaning that it makes it very difficult for the tyres to gain enough traction to continue pushing you forward.  At this point, if there is no one around to snatch you, and no real way of winching yourself out, you only really have two options.  You can either get the shovel out of your car and begin digging to clear some of the obstructions under the car (hard work, last resort for me) or jack the car up and put something under the wheels to lift the body of the car up out of the dirt and hopefully you’ll be able to drive out of trouble.  An exhaust jack is the quickest thing to lift your car up but the “bloody good idea” (Trev’s Tips number 13 on our website) also does a pretty good job of this. 

The next problem is, once the car is jacked up, you need to get something firm enough under your wheels that the tyres can get some traction on.  In days gone by people probably would have just torn up a bit of the local vegetation to help out with this but nowadays this sort of activity should and would be frowned upon.

This is where Trev’s tip of the month arises in the form of the good old faithful hessian bag.  Fill up one of these with the same sand or mud you are stuck in, stuff it under the tyres and it will provide all the traction your tyres need.  The bag holds all the material inside it together so that when you lower the tyre onto it the product will compact hard enough to drive on comfortably and the roughness and flexibility of the hessian should provide enough grip on the ground so that it doesn’t just slip out from under the wheels once you try to take off.

I’ve tried this a couple of times now and it has worked well.  Best of all it is light weight, takes up very little space in your car, costs virtually nothing and gives you another weapon to try next time things get a bit desperate.

Generally when you get stuck you’ll find that it is only two of your wheels that are spinning unless you’ve forgotten to engage 4wd or lock you hubs.  This means that two of the hessian bags, one for each spinning wheel, works best.    

Till next time

Happy 4wding

Trevor

 Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused.