Make Recap Tires Illegal

This time of year is hard on caps.

Expect a few blowouts.

 

Yeah, I was pretty much told by the tire guy that its because of the summer heat.. guess I just have bad luck this year; cause this is setting a new record for amount of blowouts in a year.

Thankfully I am a company driver so the only annoyance I have to deal with is waiting 2-4 hours for a tire change when the blowout happens.

 

Recaps are tough unless you’re diligent on keeping the pressure where it needs to be. Even if they’re a little under inflated they won’t handle the extra heat as well as a virgin tire. Personally I won’t run caps on my truck and the company I’m leased to won’t run caps on their equipment either. But for 10 years I was a company driver and we ran caps all year long and didn’t have any issues, but the pressure got checked every weekend when we were home. We ran 105k gross in the northwest and only our steer axle and lift axles were virgins, drives and 3 trailer axles were caps.

 

With no control or history over sidewall hits on the original casing yes, but if you didnt mistreat the sidewalls and maintain tire pressure, blowouts shouldnt be expected

 

The only thing we run 'caps on is our off road equipment...water trucks, dumps, and a couple of old fuel trailers that we use for storage. We run in a lot of shot-rock and the sidewalls usually let go before the tread does.
I was a believer in 'caps for a long time but the quality kept getting worse, no matter who I dealt with.
Bandag was about the most reliable but they got hard to deal with when the owner's kid took over.

 

They shouldn't be expected. But it does happen.

None of us know about the quality control.

 

Walmart runs retreads on drives and tandems nitrogen inflated.

 

I’d never run recaps. Even if the cap is good, lots of times the ties under them are past their life expectancy. I know they inspect casings, but you can’t see a lot of internal damage.
I could see somebody running them that just made local deliveries or something, but in my experience if you do much interstate at all, you are going to have problems.

 

2 years ago I think I managed to set the record for lowest recap life. My company had a recap Drive put on at a ta. 10 miles later and the sidewall blows out on the new recap Tire. I assume that this happened because there was internal damage that went unnoticed

 

I’ve seen them blow airing them up after mounting