Snow Driving – Tire Chains vs Tire Cables

Posted on April 20, 2017 by Gareth

Note: I originally wrote this article for the now retired outdoorus.website. An archived copy of the post can be viewed here. Affiliate links are present in this article.

The diversity of the US means that some people at some times are going to need to do some driving in the snow. If you live in a city you may be able to get away with your all seasons, but for those heading out on a ski trip, or who live out of a plough zone, a set of chains are critical. While certain states have legal requirements for tire traction devices (check your local DMV website), always use some common sense when driving as to whether a set of chains will be beneficial or not.

What are termed ‘tire traction devices’ come in many different varieties, beyond the well-known snow chains; cables, spikes and other devices are also available. While they all have their application, the most popular and universal are tire chains and tires cables, so how does one go about choosing?

What is the difference?

Both devices have the same goal, to improve your traction on snowy roads, but have a different design. Snow chains are the most well-known, they are literal chain links that are linked to create a mesh that you can wrap around your tire. Cables are slightly lower key, and are made from strands of steel cable that create a web covering your tires. Usually additional small metal rings are looped onto the cables to provide additional grip.

An example of tire chains (left) and tire cables (right)

What to Consider

Clearance

A limiting factor to what you can install on your vehicle is its clearance. While most SUVs and pickups have plenty of space around the wheel arch to accept any type of chain or cable, certain vehicles, especially sedans and hatchbacks with low ground clearance also have minimal clearance in the wheel arch. This not only makes installation difficult, but if you were to install chains, may result in damaging your vehicle.

Check how much space there is around your wheels, and consult your owner’s handbook for recommendations. If you are concerned about the amount of space, you should definitely go with a set of snow cables. They have a much lower profile than snow chains and are less likely to damage your vehicle if slightly loose.

How much snow

The next thing to consider is the amount of snow you’re going to be driving in. If it’s just a few inches, snow cables are more than capable. But if you’re going to be driving in much more than that then you definitely want a set of chains. The more snow there is, the thicker the type of traction device you want. Cables are relatively thin by design, which means they can’t get you through as much snow as a solid set of chains.

How much Use

You also need to consider how much you’re going to be using the device, and how far you are going to have to travel. If you’re not expecting to use them very often, and only for a couple miles, then cables are more than adequate. If you are going to be using these several times a week and covering tens of miles each time, chains are more durable and will provide you with a longer life. Some of the more expensive cables are also designed for extended use, but expect to pay for the extra quality.

Price

The cost of snow chains can vary a lot. If you know you’re going to be travelling in an area that may experience snow, buy a set ahead of time. If you have to buy chains last minute in an area that’s just had snow, chances are the prices will be high, especially if you have an uncommon tire size. Otherwise cables are usually the cheapest. We’ve discussed the compromise you will make buying cables over chains, and if you’re expecting to get lots of use out of a set, you should definitely pay extra for a good set of chains.

In the grander scheme of things they are not particularly expensive, with very good products available for much less than $200. This for a product that you can use repeatedly for a long time.

How many do I buy

Chain sets are usually sold in pairs. Most states and vehicle’s owner manuals recommend that a single set of snow chains be installed on the driving wheels. For a FWD vehicle, this will be your front wheels, and for a RWD vehicle your rear wheels. If you have a 4×4 or AWD vehicle you can place them on either set, and for extreme conditions installation on all four wheels is usually permitted.

Recommended Products

Now that you know what type of product you want to buy, you’re still left with choosing between many different products that will fit your car. To help you out, we’ve selected two chain sets and two cable sets to get you started on the search. All products come in different sizes, so be sure to check your car’s tire sizes before purchasing a set of chains.

Glacier Cable Tire Cables

A relatively cheap set of no fuss tire cables. A simple design with easy installation. Depending on requirements you may want to opt for an additional tensioning cable.

Security Chain Company Quik Grip Tire Chains

A solid set of tire chains, mainly for larger vehicles. Very well rated at a decent price.

Security Chain Company Tire Cable

A moderately priced set of cables with angular traction pattern providing slightly improved traction. The set includes a built-in rubber tensioner, requiring less attention while driving. Very good customer reviews.

Konig Snow Chains

If you’re looking for quality, Thule is a big name in outdoor equipment and their Konig snow chains are no different. While quite pricey, they still come in under $200 (for most tire sizes) and include a 5 year warranty. Good traction pattern with self-tensioner. Top choice if you’ll be making regular trips.

Conclusion

A tire traction device is a must for anyone who needs to do some driving in snow, even if just a few inches are present. Whatever type you decide, be sure to install your traction device soon after you purchase them and ensure they fit properly, and that you know how to install them. Putting them on in the snow, when you’re in a hurry is not a fun experience, made worse by ill-fitting chains. Chains are not one-size-fits-all, so you will have to check a manufacturer’s model table to determine what product is suitable for your tires. With this knowledge of the differences between tire chains and tire cables, you have no excuse to get outdoors this winter.

Wikipedia article not indexed

Posted on April 2, 2017 by Gareth

Recently I’ve been doing some freelance writing for various people via the online service UpWork. For the most part these have been product reviews of some kind, with odd jobs in between. Recently I had the opportunity to create a Wikipedia article for a musician.

In the past I have on occasion made corrections to Wikipedia pages, but never created a new one before, so it’s been interesting to see the whole process and learn all the checks and balances that Wikipedia tries to employ.

By Wikimedia Foundation – Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Wikipedia is constantly barraged with new articles, some worthy, some not so much. An army of well-respected Wikipedia users man the front, patrolling new articles, marking them for deletion, offering improvement advice, and in some small cases, approving the articles. The problem is, everyone thinks they deserve a Wikipedia page, but that often isn’t true.

Wikipedia has a number of guidelines for what it terms, notability. Especially when it comes to living persons, notoriety helps determine whether someone is deserving of a Wikipedia page. It’s also frowned upon to create your own Wikipedia page, or to even create one for someone else, with the expectation that you place such information into comments when creating a new page (see conflict of interest).

Regardless of all this, I set about learning all this information and creating a new page for this person. Wikipedia has created a Draft space for articles. It means you can create a page, work on it for as long as you want, and then submit it for approval through the articles for creation process. During this time, the site is live, but is not part of the normal Wikipedia Article space. So other’s can see and edit the page, but it isn’t listed within Wikipedia. The goal of the Draft article is to help people build a proper Wikipedia page, before it’s made live.

So this is what I did. Over several days I successively built up a Wikipedia entry for the artist, and when I was happy with the content and references, I submitted it for review as a draft. Here a draft can either be approved (which will make it live), or rejected. In my case the page was reviewed, and a user suggested that I require further references.

So I went and found further references, updated the comments and waited. But now the article falls into a major backlog that both Drafts submitted for approval and live Articles fall into. There are too many pages for the moderators to get through them all. Usually articles which are made live, or which request approval go to the top of a list, get reviewed and life goes on. But now my article was stuck in the backlog, never to be reviewed again.

So I took the power granted to every user, and made the page Live myself. Usually when an Article is made live, it will go to the top of a new list of new pages. But because my article had been created two weeks earlier, it fell into the backlog of another round of moderation, called the new pages patrol. This isn’t a major problem. An article doesn’t have to be patrolled to go live. So the article was live, you could link to it within Wikipedia, and it came up in Wikipedia searches. However if a page is not patrolled, it cannot be archived by Google, or other search engines.

This was a problem. At first I couldn’t figure out what was actually wrong, and eventually came across an article which showed that an article had to be patrolled before indexing is allowed. Fortunately the people who made these rules recognize some of the shortcomings of Wikipedia, and if an article isn’t approved after 30 days, it can start to be indexed.

30 days later, the page still hasn’t been patrolled, but it now shows up when you search for the artist on Google. It’s been a fun project, and makes me appreciate the tens of thousands of people involved in the Wikipedia project, I Just don’t understand where they find the time.

PS: It’s still possible that the page I created will be patrolled at some stage. Hopefully by then the page would have grown a bit and the artist would have built up a bit more notability (he was in a grey area when it comes to this).

More Particle Internet Button Projects

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Gareth

I posted a few months ago about the Particle Internet Button I’m playing with (link). I’ve created another 2 projects in the mean time.

Adjustable Timer

The first is an adjustable timer. The lights on the Internet Button are used to indicate 30s steps, ranging from 30s to 5min. When it turns on you specify the length of time you want to run it for by either increasing or decreasing the steps. When running the 30s that are currently active flashes. At the end of the time, the Internet Button beeps and flashes red. It can be easily adjusted and reset.

Left: select length of time
Right: Timer running

I made this back in November, but actually had a problem with it that I couldn’t figure out. I had intended to post to the Particle forums for help but never got round to it. I had in the mean time uploaded the offending code to Github. I recently reinvestigated the code with the intention of this post, and found that someone else had found my code, and solved my problem, so thanks to Github user mseneshen. Working code can be found here: source

Dice

The second project was a set of dice. Playing Catan and having people complain about how there were no 3s rolled in a game gets old, so why not create a set of dice that keep track of this and tell you facts. Apps are available for this, but then the screen turns off and it becomes a hassle. So I wrote some code to mimic a set of dice.

Left: Dice being rolled
Right: Dice have been rolled

To roll the dice you gently shake the Internet Button sideways. The code randomly generates two numbers between 1 and 6, adds them, and outputs them by lighting up the appropriate number of LEDs. To make it easier to read, LEDs are colour coded in groups of 3. The Internet Button only has 11 LEDs, so I if a 12 is rolled, the 11th LED changes colour. Because a 1 is never rolled, I could have used that LED, but it seemed less intuitive. Also, because we play Catan, if a 7 is rolled, all the lights go red.

The whole time the dice are running, a tally is kept of how many times each number is rolled. At any time you can click a button and a distribution is published to the console. I might update this later to automatically graph the data and tweet it, but haven’t tried that yet.

When I first tested the code, I was getting reproducible random numbers, so I introduced a seed from one of the analogue pins which appears to have solved that problem. Because it uses an accelerometer to trigger a throw, when it is on it’s side, gravity is enough to trigger a throw and allows me to get thousands of throws without destroying my wrists.

Some plotted results can be seen here, with actual roll percentage (bars) vs statistical roll percentage (dots).

Code is available here: source

Temperature and Altitude

I recently bought an Adafruit BMP180 that I’m trying to get running with the Internet Button. Will post details once it’s active.

New SA Traffic Laws 2017

Posted on February 20, 2017 by Gareth

Recently in the news there has been some talk about new intended traffic laws. According to this article they are supposed to come into effect on 11 May 2017. The laws are:

Bakkie drivers may not transport children in the back.
Bakkie drivers may not transport more than 5 people in the back
Heavy goods vehicles will be speed limited by weight, and require a sticker indicating the speed

This is going to happen. It has been published in the government gazette. Further laws that they wish to implement at a later stage, but have no due date, include:

Practical driving re-evaluation when renewing licence
Re-examine K53 (update it)
Lowering of speed limits in certain areas.
Goods vehicles with GVM > 9 tons banned during peak hours.

These laws were first discussed in 2015, but similar to the laws the DoT tried to pass in 2011, have been very poorly communicated to the public, and with any luck will be reconsidered. Both the laws that are changing and the proposed ones were published in the Government Gazette of 11 May 2015. And the Justice Project South Africa submitted some excellent commentary. To what it seems was mainly deaf ears.

I wanted to find more information about these topics, so tried looking around a bit. I first went to the eNATIS website, but their news page was returning a 404 error. The Department of Transport website didn’t go to their homepage (first google result), but asked me for login details. After getting to their proper home page, I couldn’t find any info on any upcoming changes to the NRTA. I then looked through Arrive Alive’s website and couldn’t find any news, and my browser warned me that the AA’s website was untrustworthy.

Let’s look at what’s been published though. On 11 November 2016, the 24th amendment to the NRTR was published in the Government Gazette, it had some definition changes, but ultimately the important parts were that as of 6 months after the Gazette was published, the following will come into effect. paraphrased:

school children may not be conveyed in the goods compartment of a motor vehicle for reward on public roads.

No one may be conveyed in the goods compartment of a motor vehicle for reward unless complying with NTLA provisions.

The amendment also immediately specified the inclusion of the following vehicles into the category not allowed to travel more than 100kmph, paraphrased:

vehicles between 3.5 and 9 tons

So what does all this mean? Basically what I put in the first half of this article. It means the law has and is changing. It means that there quite likely will be more changes later on, but there’s no new information.

The DoT really needs to reconsider the laws it’s implementing and take into count the excellent comments they receive back from the public, specifically organisations such as the Justice Project. They also need to do a better job of publicizing changing laws, and not rely on news outlets to publish these details. Very few people read the government gazette, and even fewer can make sense of what gets published.

Fiddlings

Gareth's Random Blog of Fiddlings