Article

By Jim Park

Retreading tires provides the absolute lowest cost per mile of any tire management strategy. When coupled with other enhanced preventive maintenance measures, a retreaded tire can easily go half a million miles or more, all things being equal.

Tags: Retread, Tires

By Jim Park

Everything you need to know about switching from dual wheels to wide-base singles you can learn at a playground. Picture a teeter-totter with a big kid on one end and a little kid on the other. The big kid is on the ground, while the little guy's legs are dangling in the air. The load is unevenly distributed. If you moved the fulcrum closer to the big kid, the beam would eventually balance.

Tags: Tires, Wide-base tires, Tires and Wheels, Offset axles

By Jim Park

Tire maintenance is like preparing a fine meal. Unless you really like cooking and are very good at it, it's far easier – and safer sometimes – to visit a nice restaurant. Here are five reasons you might want to consider outsourcing your tire work.

Tags: Maintenance, Goodyear, Michelin, Outsourcing, Tires

By Jim Park

Although we're in no danger of running short of our primary source of natural rubber, prices have risen dramatically over the past 10 years, contributing to rising prices for tires. Several tire makers are researching other sources of rubber.

Tags: Tires, Rubber, Guayule

By Jim Park

A driver picks up a trailer from a drop yard. Before departing, the driver does a walk-around inspection, kicks the tires, checks the lights and then sticks it into the wind. He or she has no idea how much air pressure is in those tires, except to be fairly sure none of them is flat — visibly flat, that is. Any one or several of those tires could be underinflated, or even technically flat.

Tags: Goodyear, Continental Tires, Tire Inflation, Tire blowout, Tires

By Evan Lockridge

The economic recession had profound effects on trucking, but one of the most surprising is a greater need for tires on trucks that need to be used in more than one application. That's the opposite of another trend, which is more single-application-specific tires.

Tags: Goodyear, Michelin, Retread tires, Continental Tires, Bridgestone, Tires

By Jim Park

Changing truck tires isn't rocket science. Since tire service isn't cheap, it's not uncommon to find smaller fleets and even some bigger ones doing their own tire maintenance. But safety needs to be the priority in any shop.

Tags: Safety, Tires, Shop Tools

By Jim Park

People will tell you that wheel balancing isn't necessary these days. Going back 10 or 20 years, new tires often needed a small amount of weight to balance out the irregularities in the old production process. With today's more exacting manufacturing standards, irregularities are the exception. But that doesn't mean you can't benefit from wheel balancing.

Tags: Tires, Wheels

By Jim Park

If stretching your tire budget means buying cheaper tires, you may be cheating yourself. You'll get more tires for less money — and that looks good up front — but does that theory hold up after six months or a year?

Tags: Retread tires, Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Mike Yap is a plumbing and heating contractor near Buffalo, N.Y. He operates two GMC 3500-series cargo vans and two utility trailers. He buys tires from a local auto supply jobber. He's a price shopper

Tags: Tire Report, light trucks, Tires

When it comes to commercial tire sales, 2012 could not have been any more contrasting from 2011, says Rick Phillips, Yokohama Tire's director of commercial sales. Phillips, a 35-year tire industry veteran, discusses what the challenges were within the commercial tire industry in 2012 and how they will affect truck owners in 2013

Tags: Tire Report, Economy, Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

We now have conclusive proof that automated tire inflation systems and tire pressure monitoring systems offer quantifiable payback

Tags: Tire Report, Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

In tire and wheel mounting, the line between right and wrong is a thin one. A few thousandths of an inch on either side of correct can throw tires and wheels into a mean wobble or cause them to bounce up and down like pistons

Tags: Tires, tires & wheels, concentric mounting, tire troubleshooting

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

When it comes to the alignment on your truck, "close enough" can cost you a lot of money

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Think of a tire casing as a foundation. It's the foundation of the whole tire, but also the foundation of a successful tire-cost management program

Tags: Tires

By Rolf Lockwood, Contributing Editor

There's no shortage of information on wheel integrity: posters, pamphlets, simple one-page instruction sheets and a bunch of YouTube videos, not to mention mandatory day-long wheel-installation courses. We're inundated with education on how to make sure wheels stay attached to the truck

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

The service truck arrives at 8:30 Sunday morning, as usual. The two tire techs unload 16 freshly mounted and balanced, retreaded drive tires, eight new steer tires on reconditioned wheels, and a take-off drive tir

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Good and bad in the wheel-bearing world is divided by a very fine line - about the width of two human hairs, in fact. That's not much of a margin considering the potential consequences of improper adjustment

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Vehicle alignment is a great example of why they teach geometry in high school. How many times did you wonder when you would ever use Euclidean geometry or the Pythagorean theorem?

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Even when your tires aren't out on the road getting used and abused, they're still costing you money. Stacked in a warehouse or in a storage trailer on the back forty, they're taking up valuable floor spac

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Next to the click-click-click sound of your starter on a cold winter morning, a trucker's most dreaded sound has to be the hiss of a slowly deflating tire

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Pneumatic or "balloon" tires go back to 1845, when Robert W. Thomson filled a leather-covered rubber tube with air and wrapped it around a wheel

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Tires are a big part of the fleet maintenance and operations puzzle. They serve an obvious purpose, but how well they perform in the operational theater is key to a successful tire program. What's important in a tire to one fleet may not matter at all to another

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Thousands of tires are cast prematurely onto scrap piles every month. That's hundreds of thousands of miles of operation fleets give up because their tires die untimely, unnatural and often unnecessary deaths. And the tires themselves are rarely to blame

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

The wear demons don't discriminate between standard and wide-base single tires. With a few exceptions, the kinds of irregular wear that standard tires exhibit will appear on wide-base singles, too

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

The next time you're driving alongside a truck at highway speed, have a look at the wheels. They should be running straight and true without any wobble or vibration

Tags: Tires

Excessive heat, road construction, impending safety regulations and other factors created a tire shortage within the trucking industry last summer, sidelining a record number of tractors and trailers

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Still looking for good reasons to embrace retreaded tires? Have you seen the price of oil lately?

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

How much are you willing to invest to make your tires last longer? There is no shortage of tools or strategies available to help prolong tire life, and thereby reduce tire costs, but are they worth the effort and expense

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Attaching wheels to a truck hub is serious business. Yet it's not uncommon to see some big bruiser of a mechanic, one foot against the bottom of the tire, whaling away with a 1-inch-drive impact gun driving the wheel nuts home

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

As I write each month on the latest advancements in tire development and improvements in technology to prolong tire life and reduce operating costs, one single theme remains front and center: the need to keep tires properly inflated

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

If you were serious about getting the best odds on a pro basketball bet, you'd research the heck out of the starting lineups, and know in advance that Kobe Bryant's sprained ankle doesn't seem to be much of a liabilit

Tags: Tires

By Jim Park, Equipment Editor

Tires are under constant attack, from the normal dynamic forces acting on the tread rubber, to a barrage of scrubbing and scraping actions caused by misaligned axles, unbalanced rotation, loose wheel bearings, and more

Tags: Tires