Tires aged out
Six year old tires, 2/3 tread remaining, never more than a pound or two less than max pressure. Nasty surprise on the inside of the first tire removed. Special thanks to SoundGuy for tip on ...
Forum Discussion
From Roger Marble's RVtiresafety.net blog:
" Usually bulges are the result of some impact damage done to the body cords that resulted in a few being broken due to shock loading." and "Due to the Interply Shear effects on belt durability, trailer tires need to be closely inspected after a couple of years and it appears that 5 years may be the max life for most applications."
New tires needed. Then avoid things like large/deep potholes and highways with large settlements in adjacent concrete slab sections, esp at higher speeds. ST tires are generally recommended to be replaced at around 5-6 years even if they look perfectly fine and have low miles on them.
Besides keeping tires at max sidewall psi, it's also important to never tow over 65 mph (almost all ST brands) and never tow overloaded. In some cases you can be overloaded on one side due to a slide and what's in it. Having more reserve load capacity is a good idea and will reduce stress on tires. Should be a min. of around 15 percent. Some RV manufacturers load them up almost to their max rating. We went to LRD instead of LRC normally installed and have around 30 percent reserve capacity.
Many years ago we had the tires on a fairly new Toyota truck end up with a lot of bulges on all 4 tires after a long trip that included a leg on an interstate that had significant settlement between all the concrete slabs for many miles. The repeated bam-bam-bam destroyed the tires (not steel belted). Haven't seen that yet while towing our TT but if I ever do, I'd slow to a crawl or take another route.
" Usually bulges are the result of some impact damage done to the body cords that resulted in a few being broken due to shock loading." and "Due to the Interply Shear effects on belt durability, trailer tires need to be closely inspected after a couple of years and it appears that 5 years may be the max life for most applications."
New tires needed. Then avoid things like large/deep potholes and highways with large settlements in adjacent concrete slab sections, esp at higher speeds. ST tires are generally recommended to be replaced at around 5-6 years even if they look perfectly fine and have low miles on them.
Besides keeping tires at max sidewall psi, it's also important to never tow over 65 mph (almost all ST brands) and never tow overloaded. In some cases you can be overloaded on one side due to a slide and what's in it. Having more reserve load capacity is a good idea and will reduce stress on tires. Should be a min. of around 15 percent. Some RV manufacturers load them up almost to their max rating. We went to LRD instead of LRC normally installed and have around 30 percent reserve capacity.
Many years ago we had the tires on a fairly new Toyota truck end up with a lot of bulges on all 4 tires after a long trip that included a leg on an interstate that had significant settlement between all the concrete slabs for many miles. The repeated bam-bam-bam destroyed the tires (not steel belted). Haven't seen that yet while towing our TT but if I ever do, I'd slow to a crawl or take another route.
