Michelin LT failure

gitane59 wrote:

FastEagle wrote:

wacdmc wrote:
To fuel the fire: 2012 Keystone Copper Canyon with Power King Tow Max 235/80's. 5400 miles on tires with religiously maintained 80psi. June 2, 2013 blowout on I40 in TN at max speed of 65 MPH. $4,365.25 damage to camper. ST folks say what you want but I'm switching to LT's.

Your post is typical of most catastrophic RV trailer tire failures posted in internet tire forum threads. The owner doesn't know the cause and doesn't care. It's the tire's fault and that's that.

Do some troubleshooting. Failures that cause that much damage are usually caused form a tread separation. Tread separations are almost always caused by excessive heat. The excessive heat is most often caused by a slow leak in the tire, rim or valve stem. Over loading and speeding can also cause the tread separation.

FastEagle

You're still drinking and selling the Coolaid FE.
How may ST tires do we hear failing with no obvious reasons even after the owner states that they religiously maintained air pressures who once they switch to LT's never have a problem again.
I don't believe like you do that the owners of ST's like you are negligently aiming for all of those road hazards with their ST's and suddenly start avoid all those slow leak producing road hazards after switching to LT's.
Hey those road hazards even attack ST tires while they are mounted to the rear bumpers of trailers as spares causing them to blowout while up in the air.
Evil road hazards!:R

I disagree with both of you.

First, Fast Eagle is right, a bit of investigation should be done. We know that some trailer manufacturers don't do a good job estimating the loads. So at the very least, the trailer should be weighed - fully loaded and tire by tire, is possible. If not tire by tire, then some method needs to be employed to account for side to side and front to rear variation. The tire doesn't care what the average load on 4 tires is - the tire only cares what load it is trying to carry.

Second, yes, road hazards do account for some of the failures being reported. The average guy isn't equipped to diagnose those, but it is understandable that he would blame the tire by default. If we are to understand the problem, we need to understand that 1) folks don't always report everything they know, and 2) folks don't always know what information is of value, and 3) sometimes there isn't much of the tire left.

And lastly, I am very skeptical of the "spare tire failures". As a tire engineer, those do not make sense. Why? Because I have seen tires that had no adhesion to the wire. They failed fairly quickly, but they had to be exercised before the failure exhibited itself. (We're talking miles and tens of miles, not hundreds or thousands of miles) And the failure mode was simply a bulge, and not at all like the photos. I suspect there is something else going on. If we had reports of these tires failing shortly after being mounted, that would add credence to the reports - but we don't have that. And that's why I am skeptical.