Monster Truck Madness – The Beauty of Shoe Goo

Today we are going to talk about the solid axle monster trucker’s best friend- Shoe Goo. Yes, what a sexy topic!

Here’s the deal, folks. If you have a solid axle monster truck that means you probably have Clod sized tires and wheels. Outside of large scale r/c vehicles or expensive machined wheels, they are about as expensive of a set of tires/wheels that you’ll have in the r/c world. On top of that, many folks dye or paint the wheels/beadlocks/planetary covers to match their paint jobs, making them time consuming on top of that.

For that reason, many folks in the scene do not use the standard tire CA glue that you’ll find on many other vehicles. Shoe Goo is what we substitute in. It will hold well enough to keep the tire coming from off the bead in low to medium level power applications, but if you ever want to swap wheels with different tires, you can work them off without peeling the rubber or needing to bake the tires. It’s good stuff.

For those that haven’t used it, given its goopy nature I like to use a toothpick to apply it to a tire bead. As long as you are careful, it goes on smooth and won’t leave much of a visible residue. However, if you get sloppy just be aware that due to the thick viscosity, you can smear the stuff all over. You will not be happy if you do this on your fancy set of tires!

Don’t let that stop you though, it’s easier to apply than runny CA glue IMO.

The Big Squid Boss pictured here has shoe-gooed tires and wheels. That allows me to swap tires relatively easily without needing to buy more limited edition Tamiya smoked chrome wheels.

The only real downside to the stuff is that if you want to use a big brushless system (or twin brushless systems in a Clod Buster), it won’t hold very well. You’ll blow the tires off the rims before it can even cookie cutter…and under that kind of stress it’s not uncommon to shoot the tire off like a cannon, lol.

So there’s a tech tip, folks. Unless you are into super modded solid axle monsters, Shoe Goo is usually a monster truckers best friend!