Tire Pressure/Contact Area/Weight

DougE wrote:
Yea! A real world example. Thank you Gdetrailer! It sounds as if it would be reasonably accurate to determine the loading on each tire and could help with determining the load on the rear tires with and without the trailer attached or the actual weight of the trailer when it's not practical to get to a scale.

I didn't invent this "method", somewhere I had seen it in a science magazine for kids (we had several different kids type subscriptions for our DD).. Forgot about it then sort of remembered it sometime later and had to do some Internet searches to find the exact info so I could try my curiosity out on the theory..

Anyways, I would use it as a way of "guesstimating" since the formula does not take into account that the contact patch is NOT 100% rectangular and does not account for gaps in the tread that are not contacting..

So, I did another search and found a decent website explanation that might be most helpful for visualizing how it is done.

Tire contact patch step by step instructions plus diagrams..

HERE