Mission Tire Story

[donreitz]

I’ve never had much problem with tires. This is probably due to a combination of good luck and being conscientious about keeping them properly inflated. Although I’ve read posts here and elsewhere complaining about Mission tires, I didn’t pay them much attention even though my 2499 had four of them.

That changed on our last trip. We went north to spend a few days in our favorite place in Michigan, Traverse City. To get there requires us to take I-94 along one of the most heavily traveled and beat-up stretches of road in the federal highway system. As we were negotiating the heaves and potholes, I began to hear a faint flopping noise and then someone passing in the left lane pointed to the trailer. I hadn’t felt anything untoward but I pulled over and found that one of the tires on the street side had demolished itself and left nothing but a little rubber around the rim. I hadn’t felt a thing. Thank goodness for double axles.

We were able to creep to a tire shop for help. This was late Friday afternoon and we were lucky enough to find a place willing to stay open for us. We were having the tire replaced when the guy told us one of the other tires looked bad. He showed us how its tread was rounded as if the tire was overinflated while the tread on the new tire was flat and flush with the ground. He invoked the specter of tread separation and recommended changing that one too. We did.

A lot poorer and several hours late, we set out for Traverse City. A couple hours up the road somewhere north of Grand Rapids we stopped for dinner. Doing my usual walk-around before heading into the restaurant, I found—another demolished Mission tire. This one was on the curb side. We’d been traveling a highway speeds and hadn’t noticed a thing. As this was Friday night about nine o’clock, there was nothing to do but carefully make it to the campground. The next day we had the privilege of paying top dollar to have the tire replaced at our camp site. Even after all the traveling on a bad tire, the rim was in perfect shape and a new tire slipped right on.

Of course, you know what happened next. The tire guy looked at the remaining Mission tire (we’d replaced three so far) and he showed us how the tread had bulges in it. The tread wasn’t uniformly rounded like the one we replaced earlier, but this one had bulges here and there so when the tire was rotated it looked out of round. Going for broke, we had that tire replaced as well.

With four new tires our trip home was uneventful.

Our Mission tires had worked reliably for three years. But something caused two of them to fail spectacularly (they didn’t just deflate, they fell apart) and the other two to look just about ready to do the same. We kept them inflated properly and never subjected them to abuse. There was plenty of tread left on all of them. Something beyond accidental punctures or normal wear and tear were at work here. I haven’t the faintest idea whether or not this situation is common, but given my experience and others’ comments, I’d say if you have Mission tires you might think about getting rid of them before long.

Note: Because the two tires that failed were attached to the same axle, the suggestion was made that there might be a problem with axle misalignment causing the two tires to scrub and fail. On our trip home (300 miles) we monitored the condition of the new tires and found nothing to suggest that any of the tires were subject to scrubbing or excessive wear of any kind.
Don