Waiting on the tire guy, blew a drive tire.

I bought a trailer with all new recaps and blew 3 of them fairly soon. I changed them out to virgin Chinese tires and had no more trouble. I know some guys have good luck with recaps though. I suppose the ones I had were the cheapest of the cheap, but I never tried them again.

 

Anybody else been in the tire business and been invited by a few big names to take plant tours and watch them roll that brand new tread cap on a brand new carcass? In the full time job I had for 32 years I was trained by the manufactures on inspecting for workmanship defects. Watching and learning the process trains you to know the 8 different root causes of thread separations on virgin tires for warranty claims.

 

I am not a good source on care and feeding of recaps, as the ones we ran were on slower old trucks, good care taken on inflation, known history of the casing (banged /scraped larger puncture wounds.) and a well known recapper who stood behind his work. If he capped it and you kept air in it.. It ran. Occasionally he would refuse to cap one and tell you why.
Now; with most all caps in the hands of a few major shops, and volume is what makes the money, and with the present attitude of half the population, quality went west in the covered wagons on steel bands.. About the same for new, as far as brand quality and support for the product.
Doubt if you can find 10 fleets nationwide that will claim one brand only. Price cuts across brand names. Mine is as good as his and cheaper.

Caps are kind of like horse collars/harness. An excellent harness on a sick mule want go farther or faster.

 

Michelin owns Marangoni and they use the Michelin Ring Tread Technology.
Bridgestone owns Bandag
Goodyear does their own under Unicircle.
Marangoni and Bandag were and still are the biggest.

 

All "new" tall recaps on a used trailer purchase would remind me of "Resale Red' paint on a used Corvette.. Get my junk in left hand and hold wallet down deep in hip pocket.

 

Back when I was the guy you called at 2:00 a.m. for a blown tire, we had a policy of only buying recaps from Bandag, and never a used tire. A virgin tire, even if it was Chinese was bought.

 

Well it was a place that bought and resold trailers after fixing them up a bit so probably anything is possible. Other than that it was a good solid trailer tho.

 

My question is why I have not seen a company put TPMS on all truck, trailer tires. Yes if you swap trailers you need to get away from other TPMS to find yours. But I would think a fleet could set up. So a sheet with TPMS location.
I just do very local. But to have constant pressure, and temp warnings. Say you set it to alert under 100psi, or over 110F.
For darn sure if you run super singles.

 

No blowing any more drivers op. Get back to work!

 

We run recaps on some of our trailers but we only use our own carcasses. We usually cap the same carcass twice. We've tried three but the third one is always a crap-shoot.
We've found that on our cost per mile or percentage of operating expense on an hourly basis per tire we're better off using new tires. We do a lot of hourly work and figuring operating costs by the hour is easier for our bean counters.