As this thread winds down I want to insert a little food for thought.
I belong to just about every internet forum that has active tire threads. I don’t use the same name on all of them for the obvious reasons. I don’t attract much warm sentiment. Most posters are already angry about tire failures and have a mindset, difficult, at times, to penetrate.
Having worked as an aircraft mechanic for more than 40 years I’m a pretty good study of mechanical things and try to turn over all the stones before coming to any conclusions.
Of the thousands of posts I’ve read over the past 5+ years I can confidently say less than 10% of those posters took the time to investigate the cause of their tire (s) failure (s). Because the vast majority of RV trailers have ST tires as OE they get the brunt of the criticism.
In the early to mid 2000s some of the mass producers of RV trailers used various LT tires. Their failures were very similar to those suffered by their cousins the ST tires. As the toy haulers have grown in popularity so has their size. Many now have triple axles and top out at somewhere over 18K GVWR. So have the spacious 5th wheels with some now using axles with 8000# GAWR.
In pops the 16” LRG LT tire that is really a ST tire in disguise with a 75 MPH speed rating. A strange thing has happened with this tire and it’s primary manufacturer. Whenever a failure is reported to them they pick-up all the costs and the failed tires. The consumer get’s no feed back but the bucks make them happy.
Early on in our venture into full time RVing we did over 100,000 miles and 43 states and a couple of CDN provinces in less than five years. We used a lot of tires and had just about every kind of tire failure, catastrophic or otherwise. None of them were ever determined to be caused by material failure or rim failure. They were all ST tires and we still use them - not the same brand. We are now 520# per tire above what our OE tires were rated. Since 2008 we have had two failures. One was completely destroyed. The steel valve stem was missing. The other sustained a cut sidewall in a construction area on the city streets of Rochester, NY.
So, the bottom line. Is the China Bomb Syndrome Valid? There have been zero recalls for ST tires.
People will say they have always done everything right and still had numerous failures. My question to them is, were they OE tires? None of us know the history of OE tires and just how much abuse they sustained before we took better care of them.
FastEagle
