Why do I keep blowing out tires on my truck?

CapriRacer wrote:
Allow me to explain the side to side vs cross rotation thing - from a tire engineer's perspective.

First the front tires do different things than the rear tires - so they wear differently.

There is a slight difference in what happens on the left side vs the right side, but not nearly the amount compared to the front/rear thing.

Ergo, it is OK to rotate tires front to rear, and it would be slightly better to cross rotate.

But in the past, there was a specific recommendation from tire manufacturers to only do front/rear rotation. That's because in the early days of steel belted radial tires, the adhesion of rubber to steel wasn't very good and small separations would appear adjacent to the steel wire on one side. The thought was that by keeping the direction of rotation the same, the risk of the separation occurring in the other side was reduced.

I never bought into the theory because I this is all about torque and tires experience both braking torque and acceleration torque.

Well, those days are long gone and rubber to steel adhesion is sooooo much better. Separations around the steel wire are non-existent in normal production. Yeah, there are sometimes where the adhesive materials aren't up to par, but those are relatively rare and caused by a problem in mixing the rubber. A change in rotation practice won't cure that!

I heard this rotation advice when I bought my first radial truck tires. I bent a piece of steel, welded a handle to it, to brand a arrow in the sidewall so I could mount with the same rotation even after capping them. Used until I retired, still in "might use for something" scrap steel bin.