Anyone Ever Need to Soften 50 Year Old Rock Hard Tires?

[David Greenlees]

I grew up with my father's antique cars when young, and he got his first one by trading a Cushman motor scooter and $35 for it. The car is an all-original 1924 T depot hack (that I still have) with a beautiful deluxe York body he bought the day after I was born in 1955 when my mother was still in the hospital with me. He drove it home, hid it in the barn, and let her know about it later.

As we all know, one old automobile often leads to another, and soon he purchased a 1923 Nash Six touring car to keep the T company. He used his old vehicles, although it took him a long time to find a set of suitable tires for the Nash. But they were NOS, ancient and hard as a rock; I assume they were made with natural rubber? He asked around and finally learned that if you buried old hard tires in fresh cow manure and left them there for a while, it would soften them up. In retrospect, I think it was the methane gas that did the trick.

I was about five years old and remembered him taking the tires in the back of the T Depot Hack to my uncle's farm, where we buried them in fresh manure in the fall. When spring came around, we dug them out of the pile and hosed them off (stinky job), and sure enough, the rubber has softened to what it was like when new.

He mounted them on the Nash, and it was used to go to old car events and on tours for a couple of years, and the tires worked perfectly. Fast forward a couple of years to about 1962, when he decided to sell it to raise funds to buy a 1931 Model A Roadster and placed an ad for the Nash in "Car and Parts." A gentleman from Baltimore, MD, responded, was interested, and rode all the way with his wife to CT on his pre-war Harley-Davidson "74." He purchased the Nash on the spot, and he drove it all the way back to MD with no tire troubles while his wife followed him on the motorcycle.

At only seven years old, I was very impressed with the bike and the fact that they rode it all the way up and back. And I remember being very sad to see them drive away in the Nash, never to be seen again. On occasion, I still wonder what became of it.

[Les Schubert]

That is a very interesting concept on the tires. As I live in the country I have access to manure and I have some vintage ground grip tires to experiment on!

[Les Schubert]

That is a very interesting concept on the tires. As I live in the country I have access to manure and I have some vintage ground grip tires to experiment on!
Nothing that I will tour with but interesting to have some fun with.