Old Tire Danger

[ronhusak]

JBOYLE..
What are you using on your car?
Ron

On Friday I picked up the tires for my Avanti restoration. I waited until the car was almost done before ordering...Allen Barth was nice enough to put a set of castoffs on it while he repainted my wheels.

When I picked them up the dealer made a huge thing out of tellin me they were 3 weeks old.

[hank63]

The obvious solution - drive more, to ensure your tires are worn out inside 10 years !!!!
/H

[mausersmth]

The obvious solution - drive more, to ensure your tires are worn out inside 10 years !!!!
/H

This also insures production of repair parts!
Jay Leno talks about this on his website. There is a club for the early Bentleys, before Rolls-Royce took over and changed the nature of the car. The club encourages driving these cars, even though they were built in the teens and twenties. Any part that wears is made for these cars, because there is a market for them!
Duesenberg owners are just the opposite. Most owners rarely drive more then between the trailer and a parking space. Jay says parts are very hard to find because so few of these cars ever see the road.

My Cruiser is my primary transportation 3/4s of the year. I've never had tires last ten years, so my main concern is making sure the tires I buy don't already have 7+ years on them.

Most of you prefer to use modern iron for primary transportation. Keeping a modern car reliable is less of a challenge, and the crew at Studebaker never heard of air bags, so this makes sense for most people.
Still, make sure your Stude gets some road time! Pick a day out of the week when your Commander, Daytona, Avanti or Rockne will get you there.
Active in a church or club? Dedicate your Hawk or Champion to getting you there!
Restoration cost too much to risk that kind of driving? Scout out a local park, and once or twice a month, in good weather, pack a picnic lunch and some folding chairs, park in the shade and hold a one car show! Even a trailer queen deserves a day out now and then!

Enjoy your cars! It's what the men and women of Studebaker built them for!

[JBOYLE]

JBOYLE..
What are you using on your car?
Ron

Cooper Trendsetter SE 205/75/15.
Correct size white walls, about $85 each...not a bad buy. Coker has a similar size made by American Classic for $128 each.

[PeterHawk]

I did ask Diamondback and got permission from them to reproduce their answer...

"We add the whitewalls to modern radial tires after we have an order in hand. Since
we receive tires on a daily basis from our suppliers we do not know the DOT date
until we receive the tires. As a general rule the tires have dates ranging 3 to 6
months. Some sizes are only manufactured once a year by the tire company
and could have DOT dates older than 6 months.

The main information to know is that we add whitewalls and redlines etc to
modern radials after we have an order. We do not contract with some no name
factory to build a 6 year supply of a size using worn out molds (repops), then try to
sell them before thier useful life expires. Thus we sell the customer the size they
need, instead of pushing the tire sizes we need get rid of."

[oldguy]

Questions for the techies. When we raced Go Karts, we rubbed our spare tires down with WD40. It kept them soft and flexible. You could really tell the difference after a while. Wonder if this would help preserve our "little used" tires.

[studer35]

Some thoughts about tire failure;

Any tire put into use is subject to failure. Driving our highways we see where Johnny Rubberseed has scattered his tire treads.

A tire used as intended will wear out eventually.

Most tire treads will wear out before they fail but not if the failure occurs first!! a.See Johnny Rubberseed.

I have a problem correlating failure with age from the data we have. Kind of like the tire failures Ford/Firestone were chastised for. Is it a matter of inflation pressure, load, speed, road temperature, road hazard or failure of other parts of the vehicle? If a tire manufactured in 2010 comes apart with 3000 miles on it, that will be attributed to factory defect if no external influence is known. But, if a tire built in 1990 blows out with 3000 miles on it, is that because of age or the same factory defect cited above?

New tires that develop bumpyness or a wobbly ride are not uncommon and most happen because of belt failure. I have had several tires develop a bulge in the sidewall because some internal structural piece shifted or slipped during manufacture. Early Goodyear radials experienced many tread loss incidents before many miles were logged. Anectdotes could go on and on. Only one more here. I have an old homebuilt flatbed trailer with mobile home axles that I acquired 20 years ago with badly weatherchecked tires. Most times it was pulled locally but recently the need arose to drag the thing 200 miles at highway speed loaded with a 14,000# load. It has been outdoors all these years but only one tire has been replaced and none have suffered blowouts. Visual inspection of the tires indicate they would not make it out of the yard yet they sit there full of air and ready to go.

The networks that have shown us Pintos burning up and Chevy PUs catching fire and endless Explorer rollovers are not totally convincing to this skeptic. Add to that their focus on mass retailer outlets in their "investigation" and I'm less sure of their findings. If WalMart is the biggest store in the world and they sell tires, doesn't it stand to reason that they have a high turnover and thus fresh merchandise? As a mass merchandiser they only stock popular sizes/types that move quickly, not subject to age on the shelf. In my mind the jury is still out on this case. P.S. I don't buy tires from WalMart or Sears.