Energy Suspension came through again and hooked us up with the perfect shop dawg gift. New high performance tires for our shop vehicle. We've been watching the project cars get upgraded with all these high performance tires from Mickey Thompson, Nitto and Cooper. Now the shop dawgs have some meats for our ride.
The shop ride was in need of some high performance tires.
We have been talking about having creeper races next time the boss is gone, so "souping up" the creepers has been something that has crossed our minds lately. Out of nowhere,
Energy Suspension sent over a set of High performance creeper wheels and the hot roddin' of the creepers began. Our creepers are the professional grade
Cornwell tools creepers, so they are no slouch to begin with. The Ferrari of creepers in our opinion.
Removing the very functional but stock tires
Like any professional grade tool, the
Cornwell creeper is purpose built and durable, but Like everything else in the powerTV garage on wheels, we just had the burning desire to tweek it up a notch. Removing the old wheels was a little more difficult than we originally thought.
Cornwell uses a rivet to retain the wheels and act as an axle at the same time. This rivet has the tensile strength about the hardness of the back of Superman's head.
The infamous Superman rivet
With the head drilled off of the rivet, it's simply a matter of pulling the rivet out and the wheel comes off cleanly. Keep in mind that a creeper has six wheels, so you have to deal with the Superman rivet six times. Installation of the High Performance
Energy Suspension wheels is a snap. The wheels are retained by two machine screws, one on each side of the wheel.
Installing our High Performance Creeper tires from Energy Suspension
Once we got all six tires replaced, we made time for the obligatory "beauty" shots of our newest upgrade.
Beauty shots of our upgrade.
Once the photography session was over, we put our upgraded creeper to the test. We picked up .5 second at the 6 foot line and a full second in the 12 foot track (until we hit the garage door and experienced sudden stoppage). The next test session included a road course that was marked with jackstands. We experienced a significant improvement in handling, which is a big deal when you are trying to navigate a course while laying on your back and propelling yourself with your legs pushing the floor like a spider. Every tester checked the improved ride quality box on their test forms.
Beauty shots of our "souped up" creeper
The final round of testing was a functional test involving rolling across the floor with obstacles like electrical cords and welding rods. We found the Energy Suspension high performance tire to be 50% more capable at surmounting these obstacles than stock tires (+/-10% testing error rate). After we complied the data from the powerTV testers, the final results indicate that the upgraded creeper was better in straight line, road course and off road surfaces than a stock garage creeper. It didn't hurt that we started out with a quality
Cornwell creeper and upgraded the tires to the high performance HyperFlex tires from
Energy Suspension.
Source:
Energy Suspension
1131 Via Callejon,
San Clemente, CA 92673-6230
Phone (949) 361-3935
Cornwell Tools
667 Seville Road
Wadsworth, OH 44281-1077
Telephone: (800) 321-8356
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