Should my steer tires be at least within 5 units of tread depth .. for the two?

I agree that the impact on the tires directly will be minimal. The concern I have is the small lean imparted by the difference in height. It might not be much, but it is enough to cause abnormal wear on load bearing components.

 

I have a hard time thinking that even a half inch lean spread across the width of the axle will affect the wear items, the crown in the road is much more and changes all the time.

 

Lean is relative to the road surface, yes. What that means is that the bit of extra wear generated by crown roads will be made worse by the additional lean caused by the uneven wear.

Uneven wear across steers is never going to be a huge issue. I don't think anyone would try to claim it is. However it IS a real issue.

That said, by the time you have significant differences between steers, one of those two steers is almost certainly close to losing half or more of it's working life. You can move it to a trailer and get more life out of the tire, and buy a single used or two new steers a bit earlier.

The more trucks you have, the more likely it is that you can flip-flop steers and find decent tread matches.

Even if you are a solo operator though, if you aren't on the edge of bankruptcy, why not take care of a maintenance issue before causes extra wear and tear on your truck?

Do you think that those megas that do match steers do it for any other reason than financial? Any sort of maintenance that megas actually perform on their trucks MUST have a return, or you can be #### sure they wouldn't be putting any effort into it.

 

I always replace both steers at a time, maybe make an exception if I ruined one somehow when it was nearly new. I like to take them off while they still have some life left and use them on my log trailer, then have a the deep trailer tread cap put on them.

I just right now finished pulling a drive tire off that is now junk. I picked up a rock and it is bigger than what I want to fix, sooo I will run around tomorrow and see if I can find a used one that matches up,
This sucks as I wanted to have these tires capped as a set, Iirc, I have only ever had one small nail flat on one of them.