The China-Bomb debate Put to rest

gmw photos wrote:
I am retired from a totally different industry from tires. However, the corporation I worked for had a lot of product manufactured in china. We had some good product made by those folks, and we had some that had to be discarded due to quality issues.

The difference ? It was simple in our case: if our quality control folks were on scene in the production facility in china, then we got good product. As soon as we pulled our own folks back home to the USA, the quality slipped. Sent folks back over there, quality came back up. Simple as that.

If this same principle applies to the tire industry, it begs the question, does the parent tire company have a good handle on the QC at the tire plant ?
We, as consumers have absolutely no way of knowing the answer to that.

For those of you who wish to be the beta testers for those tires made there, I say, have at it. Your money, your choice.

I prefer to attempt to stack the odds as much in my favor as I can. Most things in life are about "trying to improve your odds". How we go about that is a matter of individual research, understanding, trial and error, and a certain amount of luck.
As my lawyer told me one time many years ago, there are no guarantees in life. Do your best in thinking your way thru it, and deal with what happens.

As to the LT vs ST "debate", for me personally, there is no debate. I worked thru the debate part of it a long time ago, and am happy with my conclusions.

....let the discussion rage on.....:)

I agree and this was the point of my comment.

If there were not issues with many of the import tires supplied on new trailers why would Airstream offer Michelin LT tires? Others also have posted that their trailers came from the factory with LT tires.

My real world data involves three blowouts on two different trailers. My tires were constantly maintained with the correct tire pressure and checked for cracking and any other degradation issues. In the first case, the Carlisle tires were replaced with Good Year Marathon tires back when they were not made in China. This aligned with the change the Casita factory had made due to numerous Carlisle tire failures. There were no load changes and the trailer was towed in the same manner for several years with no failures.

The other trailer had a blow out was a less than a year old 205-75-14 Load range C Tow Master tire. In this case I installed Michelin load range B tires and operated them at 2 PSI above the indicated maximum. I am certain that my original tires were not overloaded or improperly maintained. I operated that trailer for several years with no more issues.

Many others on this forum have posted similar experiences and have replaced ST import tires with LT tires with the same load range and with few exceptions have had no unexplained tire failures. Those who choose to ignore this real world data are burying their head in the sand in my opinion. Just because you have not had a bad experience does not mean that there is not a serious quality variation occurring in import ST tire manufacturing. You have been lucky so far. If you have been involved in volume production of any product you would understand this.