Tires - The 10 Year Rule

KendallP wrote:

Desert Captain wrote:
"So your codes showed 5.5 years at the time of the incident? Or...? "

Yes, the three oldest were all 5.5 years old with 4/32" of tread and looked fine and all three were on the rear. I normally start shopping at five years but as noted, my bad, just lost track of how old they were getting. When I buy new tires I always have them put on the front and rotate the fronts to the rear. As noted in a subsequent post losing a rear is bad but a blowout on one of the fronts has a lot more potential for disaster.

:C

Roger that.

I didn't realize you had already been on a 5 year maximum plan. I thought you started that subsequent to your incident.

Seems like you're giving yourself a pretty good beating when most don't replace tires earlier than 6 or 7 years... and many go to 10... and some even longer.

If anything, a blowout at 5 1/2 years would make me question the tire quality much more than my change-out plan.

One salient fact that I inadvertently omitted was that I consistently put 8 to 9,000 miles a year on our coach. That means at 5 years I have 40,000+ miles on those tires and it is clearly time to start shopping for replacements. As noted above folks that don't use their rigs much, that spend most of their time sitting only exacerbate the potential for catastrophic tire failure {such as I experienced} due to the the low use tires "drying out"{for lack of a better description}.

I have always been a Michelin guy and while they are a bit more money tires are simply not where I want to be thrifty. My tires have always worn evenly and gotten me 40,000 mile {+/-} with a quality ride and handling. My coach has not been aligned since it left the factory in 2012,{that is the last stop on the Nexus production line} but now after 69K+ miles I am seeing a slight bit of outside edge wear on the front right. I'll be taking it in soon to have the alignment checked and adjusted as necessary.

IMHO: if you consistently get 40k miles out of a set of motorhome tires on a coach that is used on a regular basis you're doing more right than wrong. The original point being that RV tires are far more likely to time out than wear out regardless of they "look".

As always... Opinions and YMMV.

:C