How to rotate dually tires
The manual for my 2016 Ram 3500 dually shows tire rotation only side to side. Specifically, switch the driver front and the passenger front tires, switch the outer rear tires driver to passenger, and ...
Forum Discussion
mkirsch wrote:
How many sets of fronts did you go through with the same set of rears, though? Two? Three?
Now you've got four tires with tons of wear left in them, but have aged out and need to be replaced!
So instead of rotating and only needing 6 tires, you've bought 8, or possibly 10 tires total, AND had to discard four tires with tons of tread on them.
The whole premise of your argument is that tire rotation is only to compensate for alignment issues, but it isn't. You yourself have admitted that the fronts wear more quickly than the rears. Doesn't it make sense to spread the wear across all six tires and replace them all with fresh rubber at once?
I went through zero (0) sets of front tires during the same time period as the rear tires. Ten years ago, I replaced all seven tires at the same time, and have not bought any new tires since.
The front tires show 12/32nd remaining tread measured at the center rib (both sides). These have also aged out before they have worn out, despite also having 40,000 miles on them.
The spare tire is the same type of tire (HSR, where "S" stands for steering) as the two front tires. About a year or two after installing all the tires, I noticed uneven wear on the right front tire, so I installed the spare tire, and did an alignment, which for my straight axle truck only involved resetting the toe.
A few years later, I removed the front tires to grease the front wheel bearings, and I may have rotated the front tires side to side when I assembled it all back together. If I did indeed swapped front tires side to side (I'm guessing I would have, but no abnormal wear or feathering has been observed since resetting the toe) then that would have constituted two (2) front tire rotations during the 10 year, 40,000 mile period of use, with no tire replacements.
I had intended to work the spare tire back in, but was waiting for evidence to manifest a reason to, and no further evidence appeared.
Hence, addressing what in my case would have been the root cause of unnecessary tire wear (misaligned toe) as soon as it appeared, rather than allow every tire to be feathered in the right front, and then unfeathered by rotating it through all other tire positions, saved me a lot of work (since I do the work myself), and if I didn't do the work myself, it would have saved me a lot of money from paying others to do my tire rotations.
Even though, contrary to your assumptions, I never had to buy new steer tires during the life cycle of my drive tires, let's suppose for the sake of argument that someone did.
Scenario A is 6 tires purchased and installed in 2022, plus 2 intermediate replacement steer tires purchased five years later in 2027, and then a full set of 6 new tires purchased in 2032, adds up to 14 tires that will carry on until at least 2037.
Scenario B is 6 tires purchased in 2022, plus 6 tires purchased seven years later in 2029, plus 6 tires purchased seven years later in 2036 adds up to 18 tires.
Already, Scenario A means 4 less tires purchased, or $1,600 savings in today's dollars. Who knows what tires will cost in 2036/7.
One concept that has been repeated throughout this thread is that there is no one best practice that works for every owner, in every situation. The dually tire rotation recommendations of Vehicle manufacturers not only differ from vehicle brand to vehicle brand, but also have differed diametrically from year to year for vehicles produced by the same brand. For example, Ford has published three different dually tire rotation recommendations in the Super Duty owner's manuals over the last 20 years.
Another concept that was only briefly mentioned is the difference in drivers and driving style. The driving style in my household is such that either one of us can get 100,000 miles out of any set of tires on any vehicle. Ford, Chevy, Honda, Toyota, big car, little car, Bridgestone, Michelin, it doesn't matter. Our driving style is easy on tires, as well as brakes. So that could by why my front tires never needed replacing.
However, for other driving styles, and for trucks that are a challenge to keep aligned, especially when the same truck is used with a truck camper and without the truck camper, which can change the geometry of some suspension designs... the merits of leaving the back four tires alone, and only rotating the fronts, or the fronts with the spare, are worthy of consideration, and that was the point that I was trying to highlight, offering my personal experience merely as an anecdote.
