Hopefully, early in your childhood you learned to wear the right shoes for whatever adventures you planned for the day. If you were going fishing in the local mud hole with your buddies, you knew good and well not to wear your fancy shoes. If you did so, you found that they offered very little traction, and when Mom caught a glimpse of your nice shoes all filled with slop and crawdads, you probably got an ass whoopin'. Picking the right tire for the terrain you drive on is exactly the same, only if you pick the wrong tires, it's your buddies that will hand out the whoop-ass on the trail.
We had plans to run trails in several different locations: Cedar City and Moab in Utah, and Montrose and Independence in Colorado. Plus, we were driving our Jeep on the street from California and between locations, which meant our tires needed to handle stop-and-go traffic, sizzling 120-plus-degree summer road temperatures, 65-plus mile-per-hour highway speeds, as well as monsoon-drenched pavement. That's a lot to ask of a 38-inch tire, and most 38-and-larger tires would probably spit their tread lugs before getting us to Nevada. After considering the smooth dry terrain and street driving, we opted for a set of Dick Cepek F-C Kevlar 38x15.50-15s mounted on Mickey Thompson 15x10 Classic II wheels.
The F-C Kevlar tires are actually completely different tires than the Dick Cepeks of yesteryear. When Mickey Thompson took over the Dick Cepek line, the company kept the familiar tread pattern but improved both quality control and the carcass of the tire. The FC-Kevlar tires now feature a combination of two Kevlar belts (yeah, the stuff found in bulletproof vests) and four plys of polyester in the tread area along with four plys of polyester in the sidewall. This recipe provides strength, stability and an improved on-road ride. We didn't puncture 'em, and our 38s have better road manners than many smaller tires we've run. We experienced almost no flat-spotting except for real cold mornings at pressures in the single digits. The amount of rubber in contact with the ground and the small sipes in the tread make the F-C Kevlar tires stick to wet roads better than any other 38-incher we've used.
At the places we traveled to, it's best to keep as much tread on the ground as possible. We found that other more aggressive tires tended not to work as well as the Dick Cepeks in this element. The carcass of the Cepek tire is extremely flexible while still maintaining its durable four-ply sidewall. A trip over several trails in Johnson Valley, California gave us a chance to try them over sharp rocks and dunes, too. At 10 psi on our 4,500-pound Jeep, we crept over the rocks better than we expected with the relatively mild tread pattern. Normally we prefer huge lugs to work like fingers and pull us over the jagged rocks, but the Cepek 38s really shined here despite having what we'd call a mild tread. We did have one tire burp out a little air from the bead when heavily side-loaded, and we had one unseat on a particularly twisted section in Moab, Utah, so like any tire, bead locks may be needed for truly heavy off-road use.
In the sand, the smaller tread blocks of the F-C Kevlar provide a great amount of traction without digging you to China. Soupy mud won't pose a problem for the Cepeks, but tacky clay will quickly turn them to slicks. For heavy mud use, we'd choose a tire with larger empty voids between the lugs. In the beginning, we were a little leery of the dated-looking tread pattern, but the new high-tech carcass makes the Dick Cepek F-C Kevlar tires worth considering. If you like the looks of the Cepek tread pattern, then the F-C Kevlar makes a great large-size tire that can hook up on many different trail surfaces and handle the rigors of daily driving.