SprinklerMan wrote:
Well I had a pair of marathons on the rear axel of my car trailer , they were 4 years old , properly inflated , and the trailer had a small kubota tractor on it (1700 lbs ) Trailers gross is 7000 lbs . The goodyear marrathon threw the tread off at 35 mph driving on neighborhood roads , no heat build up ( only a 10 minute ride ) . When it happned I just started laughing . The tires came off a friends TT he gave them to me after he went to 16 in LT tires . I figured that since I would always be under weight by a large margin , and I was running local to cut the grass at my rentals I would have no problem . Wrong
You can't just go and blame the tires when you got them used. You have no idea what happened with them in their previous life.
Back to the original question. One thing not mentioned in this thread yet that I found in my research was Goodyear at one point temporarily moving production from China back to the US. They realized they had a problem in China, stopped making tires there for a while, and fixed the problem before moving production back. My 1994 had the original Canadian Marathons on it when I bought it in 2011. They showed some cracking, but I still used them the remainder of that summer (about 1000 miles including getting it home from where I bought it). I replaced them with new Marathons after my research left me confident they no long have issues.
While I was shopping for my tt, I looked at many trailers from the 1990's that were still on their original tires and still being used regularly by their owners.
MOST people out there have no idea of the time limits on tire life. They figure if the tread is good, the tire is fine. They are "usually" right. Tire failures in general are still a very small percentage.
