Replacement tire for the Chinese OEM rubber
My 35 foot Keystone Bullet bunkhouse is less than 2 months old and has about 500 miles on the 205/75/R14 OEM tires. I've been reading that tires are a second thought with most manufacturers and ultima...
Forum Discussion
busterbrown73 wrote:I like your thinking. In fact last year when I had a bearing failure on my sealed bearing system axles, I found that Lippert had discontinued it, and no parts were available. Lippert offered me a solution of buy one get one free as a way to get out of the discontinued axles. So I took them up on it, and upgraded from 5200# axles to 7000# axles/springs while I was at it.Huntindog wrote:
If you are willing to go to larger rims, skip the 15s and go to 16s. I wish I had.
There will likely be some challenges to doing this, but the only one that is pretty much a deal breaker is the distance between the tires.
You need 1 inch. I doubt that this will be an issue for you as that is pretty much dependant on the length of the springs, and that is pretty much standard in the industry.
You will need 3" from the top of the tires to the wheelwells. If you need to, a small lift can be installed. Either an spring over axle or lift blocks will work fine.
You will most certainly need 6 lug drums to match the new 6 lug rims. These are not nearly as expensive as I thought they would be. Do it at bearing packing time to make the job and expense easier.
Then get a quality LT tire and not worry about all of the ST tire limitations.
Upgrading to 15's is no problem. I checked a tire calculator to convert my 205/75/14's to 225/75/15's. I need just 2 extra inches in total diameter for the new tire and about 1 inch clearance under the wheel well. 16's may work but I'd have to measure for sure. Having LT tires would be ideal too. My biggest thing is the axle limitations. If I change out the hubs and drums, wouldn't it be advisable to just change out the axles to something more stout? Not that I would ever want to go over the GVWR of the trailer, but it would be nice to have that extra capacity as a reserve. Otherwise, the axles become the weak link in the chain.
I wrote about it here as it happened.
But I did not bring it up intially in this thread as it normally will cost too much when added to a a tire/rim upgrade, and the axles will usually live a little longer than the tires.
But yes, if this is a long term TT for you, and you have the $$ to upgrade, then it is a great way to improve the reliability of your TTs running gear.
There is nothing worse than dealing with a breakdown when you are using precious time off work for what is supposed to be a fun time.
Time is the one thing that you can never get back. You can always make more money.
On edit: You can sell your old tires/rims and axles on CL easily to help defray the cost of the upgrade.
