Weighing Motorhome
I went to a CAT scale in Grain Vally, MO to have my motorhome weighed and unfortunatly they could only weigh the front and rear axle, could not weigh individual corners. Does anyone know of a scale th...
Forum Discussion
I always find these air pressure, weight distribution posts interesting and amusing.
Since I have a diverse background in commercial fleet operations from small to quite large as well as being a RV owner for over 40 years I find the thinking somewhat difficult to understand. Maybe as an owner group we have too much time to worry about things that may happen rather than other things that probably will happen.
The majority of the problems we see or hear about with tire failures or unusual wear problems are caused by underinflation or poor vehicle maintainence. Toss in some for road hazards and we have about covered the issues.
We discuss endlessly how important it is to know exactly what each corner of our motorhomes weigh yet never think that the shift of a person from one seating position to another will change that weight differential more than the difference across an axle in most coaches when weighed.
If we are logical and look at the fleet operators across our country who operate thousands of vehicles many millions of miles yearly and their goal is to have minimal tire failures. They set a fleet wide tire pressure for all similar vehicles and don't adjust that every time they are loaded or unloaded or when the altitide or temperature changes. Do they experience tire failures? Absolutely, but here again in most cases it comes from abuse from too low pressure and road hazards. We all see trucks jumping curbs with their trailer wheels frequently and forget that the places where trucks deliver daily are the best or worst places to run over things that ruin tires. On a failure per mile of operation basis a fleet will rarely experience anything close to 4-5 failures per 100,000 miles under conditions far worse than an RV ever sees. It isn't unusual to find fleet drivers travel many hundreds of thousands of miles without any tire failures. When compiling stats for safe driver awards it was enlightening to find some who had millions of miles of safe driving and they had also never had a mechanical failure while on the road.
No one expects a commercial vehicle to ride like a Lexus or even a pickup truck, but keeping pressures in a range where the tires wear evenly and trying very hard to avoid scrubbing our tires on curbs or running over things that will damage them should serve the majority of us well. Our intermittent use patterns and being parked in less than ideal places frequently causes us problems, but that is just the nature of RV usage. Beyond that diligent inspection of wear patterns and sidewalls as well as keeping tires within an age range where we know they are not dying of old age should keep most of us out of trouble.
Since I have a diverse background in commercial fleet operations from small to quite large as well as being a RV owner for over 40 years I find the thinking somewhat difficult to understand. Maybe as an owner group we have too much time to worry about things that may happen rather than other things that probably will happen.
The majority of the problems we see or hear about with tire failures or unusual wear problems are caused by underinflation or poor vehicle maintainence. Toss in some for road hazards and we have about covered the issues.
We discuss endlessly how important it is to know exactly what each corner of our motorhomes weigh yet never think that the shift of a person from one seating position to another will change that weight differential more than the difference across an axle in most coaches when weighed.
If we are logical and look at the fleet operators across our country who operate thousands of vehicles many millions of miles yearly and their goal is to have minimal tire failures. They set a fleet wide tire pressure for all similar vehicles and don't adjust that every time they are loaded or unloaded or when the altitide or temperature changes. Do they experience tire failures? Absolutely, but here again in most cases it comes from abuse from too low pressure and road hazards. We all see trucks jumping curbs with their trailer wheels frequently and forget that the places where trucks deliver daily are the best or worst places to run over things that ruin tires. On a failure per mile of operation basis a fleet will rarely experience anything close to 4-5 failures per 100,000 miles under conditions far worse than an RV ever sees. It isn't unusual to find fleet drivers travel many hundreds of thousands of miles without any tire failures. When compiling stats for safe driver awards it was enlightening to find some who had millions of miles of safe driving and they had also never had a mechanical failure while on the road.
No one expects a commercial vehicle to ride like a Lexus or even a pickup truck, but keeping pressures in a range where the tires wear evenly and trying very hard to avoid scrubbing our tires on curbs or running over things that will damage them should serve the majority of us well. Our intermittent use patterns and being parked in less than ideal places frequently causes us problems, but that is just the nature of RV usage. Beyond that diligent inspection of wear patterns and sidewalls as well as keeping tires within an age range where we know they are not dying of old age should keep most of us out of trouble.
