Are Our Tires REALLY that sensitive?

Tireman9 wrote:

JimM68 wrote:
There is a lot of discussion on this. And that is good, losing a tire in a violent manner is a scary and expensive thing.

I'm a technician, not an engineer. I gave up long ago wondering "WHY?" I want to know "what broke?" "how to fix it?" and hopefully on a very good day, "how to prevent it from happening again.

I've had 2 motorhomes over 7 years, and during that time I've lost 3 tires.

Today, I run a good tpms. I weighed my rig, checked my weight tables for my tires, and set my pressures at 5 lbs above minimum for the weight. I set the alarm on my tpms to 75% of my cold tire pressure. When / if the tpms alarmgoes off, I stop.

The last time I bought tires, I had them install solid metal valvestems, pointed out in all cases. My TST flow thru sensors screw right on the inner duals. The outer duals have 3" solid extensions then the (non flothru) sensors. and the fronts have non flo thru sensor screwed right onto the stems. This eliminated my previous problem of leaking extensions.

And now I just forget about my tires. Every spring coming out of storage, I check and adjust the air pressure, and the rest of the season I ignore them. Unless the TPMS alarm goes off.

Minor but important point. If your "cold" inflation is the MINIMUM needed to carry the known actual load they you might want to bump up the warning point on your TPMS. A tire that has lost 20% of it's required inflation is considered to be "flat" and driving on it will do irreversible internal structural damage. This damage might not make itself known for weeks or possibly many months but you will definately have shortened the tire life.

I am watching the TPMS CONSTANTLY as part of my gauge scan. I see the actual number for each tire at least once every 6 minutes. If the alarm goes off, my DW gets a bit out of shape.
when my TPMS alarms, it is plain and simply time to get off the road now.