MAXTRAX XTREME Black Recovery Boards

The MAXTRAX XTREME is the hardest-working board MAXTRAX makes: 88 replaceable hard-anodized alloy teeth set into reinforced heavy-duty engineering-grade nylon, built for people who pull vehicles out for a living rather than once a season. Black is the quiet one — the most capable board in the range, in the finish that disappears into a dark rack. Sold as a pair.

Black is the XTREME that does not announce itself. On a black rack or a blacked-out build, these read as part of the vehicle instead of two orange billboards on the roofline. The cost, stated plainly: black is the hardest color in the range to find once it is buried behind you or you are working after dark, and on a toothed board you also want to see the teeth to inspect them. Telltale leashes matter more here than on any other color.

Living with a toothed board. The teeth are what you maintain — the thing that makes an XTREME different to own. All 88 are the same shape and size, so any spare replaces any damaged tooth, and you change them yourself with the XTRACT Insert Tool, whose bliplock design stops you over-torquing on reinstallation. Inspect after a hard recovery and replace damage rather than live with it, since a missing tooth concentrates load on its neighbors. Full kits are available. Rinse grit out before it dries into the seats.

• The MKII is the honest recommendation for most people. Buy the XTREME only if you use boards hard and often: recovery work, driver training, racing.
• Plan on finding them again. Black is the color you lose: churned mud, a snow rut at dusk, the shadow under the rig.
• Lifetime warranty, and we rarely see one come back. The failure we do see is bridging in very cold weather with a hard impact. MAXTRAX has always taken care of it.
• Alloy teeth are bulletproof, with a caveat. They hold a spinning tire where nylon lugs give up, and chew a sidewall if you spin on them — an increased risk of tire damage if you do not know what you are doing.

Mounting these? One Universal Mounting Pin now fits the whole MAXTRAX range, which leaves two choices: thread length — 17 mm for bracket mounting, including every bracket we sell, or 40 mm through a camper panel — and capacity, a two-board pin for this pair alone or a four-board pin if you run two sets.

More recovery gear and traction board mounts.

Deciding between the XTREME and the MKII is worth a phone call. We were MAXTRAX's original U.S. distributor and have stocked the brand since it first reached the United States. The whole range sits in our warehouse in Prescott, Arizona rather than at a drop-shipper, so we can tell you how the extra stack height changes what fits your rack, and whether you will ever use the teeth.