Snow is a pain in the butt. If you don’t have the best tires for all of this mess you may wonder how you can get an upper hand. Buy studded snow tires? Those can get expensive. How about making them yourself using regular tires and barbed wire? Well, the guys at the Garage 54 YouTube channel decided to make some studded snow tires using barbed wire to see what happens.
The Garage 54 team is no stranger to doing weird experiments with tires. During the summer they made an off-road tire using pieces of serpentine belts bolted to a tire. They also made studded snow tires using bolts, soda bottle caps, self-tapping screws and even bandages. This latest tire experiment is definitely on the weirder side as the team decided to make studded tires with sharp rolls of barbed wire.
Installation is about as you’d expect. The team took a giant roll of barbed wire and wrapped it around two tires multiple times. The logic here appears to be that the sharp and strong barbs would dig into the tread and into the ground, making for an awesome budget snow tire.
They flattened some of the spikes to prevent the tires from blowing. It appears the team also bound the wires together so they didn’t immediately come apart.
The installation didn’t go that smoothly, the barbs still caused cuts in Vlad’s hands despite him wearing thick welding gloves, but the end result does look a bit like a very discount studded tire!
For a test of their new creation, Vlad decided to race a VAZ-2102 estate with an open differential up a snowy hill. For the initial test, the car wore snow tires that may have had some studs in the past. Unsurprisingly, the poor car struggled to ascend the hill multiple times. It just couldn’t get the traction needed to get to the top.
After failing to make the climb, the team removed the worn-out snows for the barbed wire snow tires. How does it work out? Extremely well…for a moment.
The VAZ made the climb with ease, but the barbed wire didn’t want to stick around. The wire was ejected from one tire and fell off of the other at the top of the hill.
This was probably because the team flattened some of the barbs to prevent tire punctures.
Either way, while the car made the climb, it wasn’t as successful as their other tire experiments. Between the bodily harm of mounting the barbed wire and the wire not sticking onto the tires, it probably won’t even work in a pinch.