Texas heat causing havoc on tires

Trailer up on drivers side jack had the passenger side outer tandem tire blow while it was being worked on Tuesday night at the Carlisle,PA loves.

Guy under trailer at the time was not pleased & it looked like the trailer might tip with the extra lean going on...

 

Did you offer to buy him some clean skivies?... Lol

 

so glad i drive by night.

but i surely did have a blow out or two, years ago during the hot days.

 

9 out of 10 blow outs are recaps, or old rotten tires. I had a recap put on drives out west from Schwab and it blew about 2 weeks later in hot weather. And pressure was keep at 105psi cold. It was tread separation. Go figure.

 

Recaps are not the guilty party. How the tire and casing is treated during it's life is. And unless you own and maintain properly all 18 of them from installation to replacement, a situation that covers maybe 1% of all the trucks on the road, failure is assured.
I ran recaps for 2 million+ miles.
1. My own virgin casing, returned to me with my brand on them
2. Pressures and loading never exceed limits
3. Use the same Michelin recapping plant/ dealer for everything for 15+ years.
Never a failure.
The problem? Negligiable cost savings. Not worth keeping sets of recapped tires in the garage waiting to be needed.

 

I used to work with a 30 year tire industry veteran.... He explained that there are 2 ways that recaps are done... A good recap is vulcanised onto the casing... This is closer to welding than glueing. The process actually bonds the cap and case into one single piece of rubber... But just like welding, the vulcanised joint is also the weakest point in the tire... Thus why recaps will still come off.

The other, older, and less reliable method is more akin to glueing... I can't remember the specifics... But he told me never run one of those type of recaps as they will not last.

Another point he made was that in his experience the vast majority of recap blow outs didn't appear to have failed because of faulty capping... But instead from damage previously done to the casing that eventually caused the case to fail... Something that he says is difficult to see when looking at the remains of the tire after it blows out, without lots of experience and knowing what to look for.

 

I thought I had a problem one day and hit the exit. Got out and felt a tire and it was almost cool to the touch. This was June in Tennessee. They don't get as hot as you imagine.

 

We run Bandag caps on our own casings that we send to Les Schwab to have done. Paying attention to tire pressure and inspecting the tires is the biggest thing to avoiding failure. We run heavy in the NW and rarely have tire issues.

A lot of guys run around with under inflated tires. If the sidewall says 110 then run 110, running 100 or less will cause more sidewall flex which will generate more heat and will cause the tire to fail. Also in TX the 80+ mph limit is also a factor because the guys that can run 85 will still run 85 when it’s 100 degrees out instead of slowing down.

 

I haven't witnessed a driver doing a pretrip in over a month easily. Way too many lazy and careless steering wheel holders on the road these days.

Most blow outs are the result of a few things..... MOSTLY THE DRIVER.



1) DRIVER Abuse damage; curbing, overspeed in general or overspeed in high heat conditions , driving while underinflated

2) DRIVER laziness; no pretrip, thus driving on visible damage or underinflated tires or drycracked tires ... Or contact with loose or damaged vehicle parts.

3) Mfg Defects; The LEAST common. With the exception of ChinaBomb tires that have flooded the markets last many years.



Get out and do your pretrips !

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