why are my steer tires cupping?

Japanese tires wear ok....it's those cheap ##### Chinese tires..do not buy them.....

 

I had this happen to the Volvo I drove a couple of years ago. Turns out the owner was a cheap ##### and put used steers on the truck all the time. Never bothered to have balance checked or any form of alignments done.

The belts started to separate and caused the tires to cup. Now that I think of it. The SOB never did pay me for the new tire I had put on.

 

after you fix tour problem you might want to check into putting a set of cntramatics on the steers. they have worked great for me & others on this forum. I only put them on after new steers, 3 axle align & all other needed work. so far wearing perfect, over 80,000 miles. b.f. 244st

 

the cupping is more than likely due to as others have said, balance, shocks, bad tires, or other worn susp parts, pulling is an alignment issue, if your king pins and wheel bearings dont have major slack.

 

You sure they weren't "all position" tires?....Steers.....well good steers, cost too much to waste on drive or trailer axles....

 

He put used steers on the steer axles. Generally put any other used tire he could get for under $100 everywhere else.

 

So....Since caster/camber is not a tire cupping issue, Why do you suppose that getting it set right cured the problem?
Why do you suppose that after having it aligned no less than 3 times at another shop, Installing Centramatic Balancers and installing new shocks....It was still cupping?

The problems went away instantly when the caster/camber was set correctly and the alignment shop that finally cured the problem said that the caster/camber issue was 100% of the problem.


Since they cured the problem that no one else could cure...I hafta believe that they know what they're talking about.

 

Last cupped tires I had, it was the shocks. I had a wheel alignment too.

 

AND AS AN ALIGNMENT TECHNICIAN FOR 18 YRS, i am telling as i told you before caster is NOT a tire wearing angle.....CAMBER IS.

 

And I'm alignment tech as well. I will disagree, sort of. If Cross Camber is 0.00 but Cross Caster is high some trucks will pull and may have shorter tire life. Shorter may be hard to pin down as it may only be 10% difference in how long the tire would wear. A cross caster higher than .05 will be felt. This is often referred to as a caster pull or a radial pull. It's a nice fits all term.

Cross Caster/Camber is the difference between the 2 sides, the left might be 3.2 and the right might be 3.6 so the cross would be .04

Where caster will eat tires and be ugly is when you have high caster on one side and low camber on the other side. The rolling force of the high side caster will force the tire to turn to the weaker camber. When that condition shows up you have little choice but to get the cross caster as close to even as possible and see how the tires wear after that. If tire wear is still high then a new axle may be the only choice.

If the cross caster is real high but cross camber is even that truck will pull hard enough eat the outside edge off the strong side tire while leaving the weak side tire wearing perfectly. The best part of this problem is the truck will steer fine until the strong side tire gets to about 40% of tread left then the tread will pull the tire opposite way, to the low side of that tire.

If a customer comes in and has a tread wear problem on one side consistently it's usually a caster camber problem. Driving on 2 lane roads can also mimic this problem as well so some digging into where and how it gets driven has to be done.