just wondering... tire shreads

parkmanaa wrote:
IMHO 'ME AGAIN' has the best answer above. The Michelin XPS all-steel cord tire is undoubtedly the best commercial tire on the market. That tire has been around at least 15 years and I have yet to see or hear of a single complaint (some complain about the initial price, but ................)
I was in the tire industry for 40 years, did many scrap tire analysis, and questioning of persons who had tire failures. Most is classified in this order:
- cheap tires to begin with, or tires too small or low load-rated.
- poor maintenance of air pressure.
- overloading, usually having no idea what their rig really weighs loaded.
- Impact damage, i.e., hitting something in the road, holding your breath for a
few miles, then breathing again 'because I didn't ruin a tire'. Well, guess
what, you really did, sometimes it takes a few hundred miles to actually blow.
- failure to have tires inspected by a qualified tire technician beginning in
their 5th or 6th year.
- Lastly, tire age. Don't be snowed into thinking tires will self-destruct
after 5 or 6 years. Properly maintained, they should last a good 10 years.

Could be more reasons, but these are the ones that come to mind; in that order.

Me Again here! I think you are in tune with where I am at. Some tires, which includes most of the currently available ST tires just do not have a good track record! The two tires I noted(and I have used both) have not had the negative feed back that so many other tires get. I was lucky in that my trailer came OEM with 16" LT tires as an upgrade to the standard 15 ST tires. However they were Kenda Klever china bombs! Kenda gave me 110 each to remove them from service in the first year before they failed, and I installed Michelin XPS RIB which I ran for 6.5 years and 40K+ miles, then sold them on CL for 200 bucks. I installed Bridgestone Duravis R250's this go around and have been to Arizona and back on them twice. The R250 may be a better tire than the RIB and cost about 50 bucks less per tire. Which played into my choice of them this go around.

So having LT from the get go, I was not caught up in the ST tire night mare that some have become stuck in. I wrote this about tires back in 2009 and I believe that it is still worth a read.

http://www.rv.net/forum/index.cfm/fuseaction/thread/tid/23161726/srt/pa/pging/1/page/1.cfm

This also is a good read! http://www.rv.net/forum/index.cfm/fuseaction/thread/tid/23225970/srt/pa/pging/1/page/1.cfm

Lets just say that the tire industry and the trailer industry is not doing consumers many favors by supplying cheap tires OEM on new RV trailers. An educated consumer should not agree to drive off the dealers lot on cheap tires or tires that are overrated and barely meet the GAWR requirement.

Chris