Granted my current machines don’t run tires sizes that would fit on Argo or maxs
I can say stay away from knobby tires. Had those on the Scrambler. WAY too much grip on pavement could hardly turn. Good on lose dirt, and climbing small logs. But terrible in snow and mud. Also if you wanted them aired down they’d shrink like crazy no ground clearance.
I would side on the favor of ground clearance. In my opinion. 1” can mean a world of difference. There are simply many more small obstacles (little rocks, shallow ruts) than there are large. (huge rocks, deep ruts) we don’t necessarily notice all the easy to drive over terrain. But go in the opposite direction. Lose 1” such as deflating your tires more and you’ll suddenly start hitting stuff all over the place. When I moved up from 28” to 31” tires on the Coot I noticed a huge improvement. Terrain of course is a big part of tire styles of course. I encounter rocks much more often than mud, and when I encounter mud aggressive narrow seems to be what works best as every inches of ground clearance is one more you can sacrifice to make it to the other side while digging for traction.
As for as tread filling up. The way I look at it. Tread only fills when forward progress is stopped. A tire that is spinning at the same rate of ground covered will never “dig, pack, or cut soil / mud from the ground and fill” Thus to some degree we wrongly equate getting stuck with smoothed over and packed tread. Where if we did not get stuck / our progress was not slowed we would not fill our tires up. This does not however present a solution. It is often beneficial to dig into the soil / mud to find more traction. However doing so will in turn fill the tread (unless it is very good at self-cleaning and or excessive wheel speed is used to fling packed material out) Digging for traction will of course lower vehicle ground clearance. Which will increase resistance with belly hitting ground, produce more drag which will slow vehicle progress and increase tire slipping thus increase packing and your left with a stuck vehicle with smoothed over tires.
So in turn: Aggressive may increase forward progress and less wheel spin thus not digging and not packing. Likewise mild tread may produce enough traction without wheel spin not pack and not high center.
NDT tires. I’ve never seen an AATV with NDT tires besides the Coot, but they do make a 24” tall 10” rim NDT for the M274 which would look killer on an Argo. In my experience the NDT is an underappreciated mud tire. It’s very hard to pack with snow or mud. The reverse scoop tread really stays clean. However it lacks any sort of biting faces trying to climb logs or ledges should be of note. Also with snow chains half of every chain falls into a void.
R-1 tractor tires. Excellent, just not applicable to Argos and Maxs
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Originally Posted by monkstr6100
