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Old 05-14-2018, 09:48 PM   #1
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Tire Failure, Tire Investigation and Camper Damage Repair

We had our first campout of the year a week ago. We met up with other Sunline Club friends at Geneva On the Lake SP in northeast Ohio. The campout was great, however the trip there and back was not so good.

I had 2 tire failures. Total tread separation on 2 sides of the camper. And there was body damage to the camper.

This will end up being a growing post as I will keep the blowouts, what failed, the new tires, and the body damage fix in the same post. I will update each area as it happens and I get some time to post it.

The first blow out…

We started out on a 150 mile trip one way on Friday 5/4. I do have a TPM (Tire Pressure Monitor) and all tires were at 80 psi cold before we left. The tires are LT227/75R16 Load range E BFG Commercial TA tires.

At 100 miles into the trip, the right rear tire blew out. I only tow at 60 mph as a norm. May coast up to 65 and back down but that is it. The wind was surging a lot. I could tell the whole rig wiggled from the wind blasts. The tires in the non-sun side of the camper were 3 deg F warmer then the sun side while towing. I thought that was odd but the pressure on all 4 was within 1 or 2 psi. Maybe the wind surges created a little more heat in the one side of the camper with more side flex? Don't know only a guess. I do not think that was a cause, more of an observation. My friend towing to camp also has a TPM and he noticed the same thing.

I heard a loud "bang", looked in right mirror and saw a puff of smoke as the tire tread flew off. Never felt anything in the truck. A few seconds later the TPM went off. After limping about 1,000 feet to get out of the guard railed area, we pulled off the side of the interstate and found this.

The flying tread did some good damage to the camper and it beat up the metal valve stem on the front tire creating a leak. Also broke off the TPM sensor on the front tire. The tread even beat off the grease cap on the rear axle and I lost 2 hub caps. After fiddling with the valve stem on the front tire I could stop the tire leak which was now down to 60psi. I pulled out the generator an mini compressor and pumped it up to 80psi before moving the camper another 1,000 ft to the exit.



A close up on the missing grease cap. Dust in the bearing grease not. Not good.


You can see here, the entire outer tread separated from the tire and blew off. A large sidewall split went from the OD to the bead.


And the tire on the ground after putting the spare on.


Also to note, we stopped for fuel and was lug nut tightening on all wheels 10 minutes before this tire blew out. Never noticed anything wrong and I was right at the tire.

At the exit was a Nissan truck dealer that said “Commercial Vehicles” on the sign. Great! Maybe they have a tire? I went to see the service manager and told him my issues. He checked his inventory but did not have a tire. I asked if I could change my tire and put the spare on in his lot. He said yes and do you need a floor jack to make it easier? I told him I had all the tools, jacks. etc. I just needed a safe flat spot to change this tire rather than out on I-71.

Had to think up what to do with a missing grease cap. H'mm, well MacGyver would be proud. I made one.

Wiped all the dust/dirt out of the end of the bearing. I had some lithium grease I use on the WD hitch and to ball so I packed the end of the bearing with grease to help keep any more dirt out of the actual bearing.


Then I created a grease cap out of Gorilla tape. It worked and created a protective cavity for the grease inside.


Then I took a hubcap off the left side and put it over the Gorilla taped hub. I moved the TPM sensor to the bent valve wheel.

The service manager was really helpful and found me a tire shop in Medina OH and said these guys will for sure have one. I called and they had 4 brands in my size. I bought one Firestone Transforce HT LT to replace the blown one and took the right front tire off (the bent valve stem tire) and put it in the truck. The shop put the new tire on the front location as this tire took an instant overload and was leaking down before I could pull off and did not want to press my luck. Then we went to camp.

Here is some of the damage on the door side of the camper. Took these when we made it to camp




Blew a hole in the Darco. More Gorilla tape to the rescue.


My poor mud flap took a direct hit




We had a great weekend campout with friends and started heading back home. At approx 100 miles into the trip, the second one blew out on the left front side. This was about 20 minutes after a gas stop. Same pattern, blew the entire tread off and a large rip in the sidewall all the way to the bead.

Sitting on the side of the interstate dealing with it.






Now not having any good spare left, I had to put the bent valve stem tire on and go slow as I can for the next 50 miles to get home. I had to pump up the tire as it was down to 70psi so I had to dig the genny and the compressor out of the truck again. This time on the edge of I 71 with truck whizzing by at 70mph. I was able to pull the 3/4 of entire camper on the grass leaving only the blown wheel on the very edge of the shoulder. This gave me about 10 to 12 feet of room before the right hand white line of the lane. It was about the best tire changing place on the side of a interstate as one could get.

The mud flap on the front left took a beating and it cracked the fender but it did not beat up the gold aluminum thankfully.

We made it home OK. Some one for sure was looking out for us as this could of went a lot worse, but it didn’t and we are very thankful. The Nissan dealer, the tire shop, the MacGyver grease cap, sealing the Darco up with Gorilla tape before the rain came, everything just worked out.

The first blow out I left at the tire dealer. I forgot to grab it as I wanted to talk to my retired tire engineering buddy on this. The second one I still have here in the barn.

Now to sort out what happened, what to get to put back on as this camper is not leaving the barn yard without 5 new tires.

Thanks for looking.

John
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Old 05-15-2018, 04:01 AM   #2
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Here's a fairly complete resource that includes Load and Speed Ratings tables along with instructions on how to determine a tire's age without resorting to an online decoder.

Determining the Age of a Tire and Reading the Code


I learned today that the date code is usually only stamped on one side of the tire so I have to look on the inside of my tires (naturally) to find when they were manufactured.
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Old 05-15-2018, 07:26 AM   #3
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You got some bad tires there dude I would take them right to Mr Big's desk.
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Old 05-15-2018, 09:10 AM   #4
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A crazy scenario indeed, John. One pattern I noticed- both blowouts happened shortly after a gas/rest stop. Mine was the same way- pulled off at a rest area for a short break- literally long enough to check tires and take a bathroom break. Get back on the highway, and about 7.5 miles down the road, the tire blew. So I'm wondering if there's something about the heat of the brake drums, heat of the tires, heat of the pavement, something like that all causing a surge of heat soak that results in catastrophic failure.
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Old 05-15-2018, 09:35 AM   #5
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Sorry to here about this JohnB.

Is it possible the 80 psi caused this?
My 250 Transit van has E rated tires which show a max pressure on the sidewall of 85 psi. My van’s GVWR is 9,000 pounds and Ford recommends the pressure be set to 71 psi.
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Old 05-15-2018, 09:48 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Digmenow View Post
Here's a fairly complete resource that includes Load and Speed Ratings tables along with instructions on how to determine a tire's age without resorting to an online decoder.

Determining the Age of a Tire and Reading the Code
Hi Dig,

Thanks for posting the link. There is a lot of good info there. I also see it refers to Roger Marble and his work looking into RV tire failures, all kinds of RV's. He is a retired tire engineer who has gone RV'ing... I know him and he has helped me a lot over the years. A very credible source of good info and he is only trying to help give back to the RV community to better help awareness of tires and their needs and failures. Here is his blog RV Tire Safety Lots of good stuff in there.

The tires I have now where installed in 2012. In 2009 I had bought some of the last ST tires made in North America before everything went overseas. This was part of my camper axle alignment correction work on the T319SR. During 2012 I had 3 of the 4 ST tires fail in 2012. I was lucky then, I found all 3 before they let go.

This prompted me to become better educated on how tires fail, way, the loads and pressures and the need for added extra reserve capacity. This is where I hooked up with Roger. Wanting to know in case I was doing something wrong, I cut up one of the tires that just started to fail and sent it to Roger to analysis.

See this post for more info http://www.sunlineclub.com/forums/f7...ics-14359.html

From those learnings and the fact in 2012 there was no more North America made ST tires left, I made the decision to upgrade to LT tires. This was an amount of work and $$$ in my tire size. ST's and LT have very different load tables. This made me upgrade from 15" wheels to 16" wheels to gain enough load capacity. And increase the amount of reserves capacity to deal with the unique needs of tandem axle trailers. See this post for more info on the upgrade. http://www.sunlineclub.com/forums/f7...tml#post106198

This now brings us to current day. Here I am now about 5.5 years later after the install and I have 3 more tire failures. Yes 3, 2 blew out on the road and the 3rd one I found here in the barn inspecting the tire when I took it off the rim.

I am going to do a cut and paste from my 2012 Denman ST tire failures to show miles, years and failures. Came from here http://www.sunlineclub.com/forums/f7...tml#post110287

Quote:
Here are the date codes. All tires installed on 4-5-2009

1st tire failure on 4-21-2012: 10,614 miles, DOT mfg. date 1908 or the 19th week of 2008

2nd tire failure on 6-20-2012: 11,225 miles, DOT mfd. Date 2908 or the 29th week of 2008

3rd tire failure on 7-17-2012: 11,770 miles, DOT mfd. Date 2908 or the 29th week of 2008

The 4th tire, did not yet fail, was removed from service on 7-17-2012: 11,770 miles, DOT mfd. Date 2908 or the 29th week of 2008
Now lets looks at the current LT tires failures, or shall I say when they actually blew apart. They actually started to fail a while before they blew apart, I just missed the signs. More on this later on how to spot it.

BFG Commercial TA's LT225/75R16's Load range E

5 tires installed on the camper 7/8/2012.

As of 5/7/18 we put on 12,160 miles on the BFG's. Due to moving our home etc during this 5 year period we did not camp as much as we normally do and it is reflected in the lower mileage for about a 2 year period.

The bottom line:

When running my prior ST tires, 3 of them failed in an average of 11,200 miles and 3 years time.

When running my LT tires, 3 of them failed in and average of 12,160 miles and 5.5 years time.

One could look at that and say. Gee, JohnB does not have a lot of luck with tires... And right about now, I would agree.... Both types of tires failed in close to the same mileage just the ST's failed a lot faster.

More yet to come on, what went wrong.

Thanks

John
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Old 05-15-2018, 09:54 AM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mainah View Post
You got some bad tires there dude I would take them right to Mr Big's desk.
Hi Mainah,

Bad tires... Well this is more to that story and I may never know. They are for sure now out of warranty by age. I do not thing BFG is going to do much.

After doing some more digging, there may be a manufacturing defect in them, I do not really know and I'm sure I may never know. It just leaves this lingering fact hanging out there.

In July 2012 just after I bought mine there was a recall on this type of tire and wheel diameter, just mine was one size smaller in width. Here is the recall notice : http://www.tiresafetygroup.com/TSG-R...7__31_2012.pdf

And a video from 2013 from one tire dealer showing what to look for on these BFG's. It sure looks like the same failure I had. BFG Recall Video by dealer

I may never know what went wrong, me being me... I want to learn and know so if I'm doing something wrong I can fix it. If it is a manufacturing defect that I happened to land into, well OK that is an answer at least and not a cause I did. I needed to change the tires anyway this year so the tire cost is not an issue, but the damage it beat up on the camper is a headache to fix.
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Old 05-15-2018, 10:29 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunline Fan View Post
A crazy scenario indeed, John. One pattern I noticed- both blowouts happened shortly after a gas/rest stop. Mine was the same way- pulled off at a rest area for a short break- literally long enough to check tires and take a bathroom break. Get back on the highway, and about 7.5 miles down the road, the tire blew. So I'm wondering if there's something about the heat of the brake drums, heat of the tires, heat of the pavement, something like that all causing a surge of heat soak that results in catastrophic failure.
H'mm, well never thought about that pattern. But I do have a TPM on the camper and the tire stem temps were around 89F. And if there is a lot of brake heat or bearing heat, it will heat the rim and I find it on the TPM. In this case, the tire temp itself I thinking is not the cause.

But it does leave you with, why after a rest stop within 10 to 20 minutes do 2 tires blow out like that? Is this just a coincidence of odd fate??

I now feel the damage inside the tire was there sometime last year. Maybe even starting the year before, just it did not yet hit critical mass. And worse, I did not check it closer which I have now learned is a need of a LT commercial truck tires. That is a learning for me. My ST's I could more easily see the tread bulges. These heavier LT tire treads, they do not bulge the same as ST's in a level of warning. The LT's are bulged, just the stronger tread makes it more subtle.

Here is the mileage makeup on the LT's. This also shows our reduced camping since we started developing the new place in 2013. I never saw it like that until now. Now I know why I was in camping withdrawal...


We really did not camp much in the last several years. The issue inside the tire I am sure started long before our first campout this year. It may be that the tire was older and that combined with the internal damage all went once they were heated up towing.
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Old 05-15-2018, 10:44 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by johnnybgood View Post
Sorry to here about this JohnB.

Is it possible the 80 psi caused this?
My 250 Transit van has E rated tires which show a max pressure on the sidewall of 85 psi. My van’s GVWR is 9,000 pounds and Ford recommends the pressure be set to 71 psi.
Hi John,

Your new tires may be rated different. If 85 psi is the max cold pressure molded in the tire, that is the max that tire is rated for in the cold condition. Curious what brand, size are they? I have not heard of a 85 psi tire "yet"

Mine has it molded in at 80 psi. I do not think the 85/80 psi is issue but thanks for bringing it up.

And yes on a motorized vehicle Ford (or any mfg'er) can lower the required pressure to meet the axle ratings. Basically they give you more tire capacity then the axle ratings are for. A good thing.

In a tandem trailer setup like many of us have, you really should not use the load table pressures. You use max cold side wall pressure to target. You may be able to on a single axle 2 tires setup go with load tables, but on tandem axles the tires have to handle and additional load of turning/scrubbing. Basically we drag the tires everytime we turn as they do not steer. I will go more into this scrubbing issue when I show my tire failure pics.

Thanks

John
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Old 05-15-2018, 12:49 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnB View Post
Hi John,



Your new tires may be rated different. If 85 psi is the max cold pressure molded in the tire, that is the max that tire is rated for in the cold condition. Curious what brand, size are they? I have not heard of a 85 psi tire "yet"



Thanks



John


They are Hankook Dynapro HT
235/65R16C

Apparently a fairly odd size.
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Old 05-15-2018, 03:44 PM   #11
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Quote:
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They are Hankook Dynapro HT
235/65R16C

Apparently a fairly odd size.
H'mm, your right 85 psi... https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tires...tnum=365R6RH12

I'm assuming those are the OEM tire. The reviews are sort of all over on them.

They also have other odd pressures. I wonder if they are a European style tire. They are a 10 ply tire just not declared a LT.

Learn something new all the time.

Thanks

John
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Old 05-15-2018, 04:43 PM   #12
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Yuck, sorry to see all the trouble you had.

My Yokohama geolandars are showing cracking in the treads at 6 years. Lots of cracking, not very deep. I was planning on using them to go to ak and put new on next year until I looked at them tearing things down. I’ve been feeling like I didn’t want to get new, but your photos ease the pain of buying 5 new tires so a positive.
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Old 05-15-2018, 05:48 PM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tod Osier View Post
My Yokohama geolandars are showing cracking in the treads at 6 years. Lots of cracking, not very deep. I was planning on using them to go to ak and put new on next year until I looked at them tearing things down. I’ve been feeling like I didn’t want to get new, but your photos ease the pain of buying 5 new tires so a positive.
How many miles in the 6 years? If it is in the 34,000 range like the bronze bushings...

6 years is not on your side, miles are most likely more than mine. My 2 cents, (your lots more cents) buy new tires before you go to AK....

Going to AK, do you have 2 spare tires mounted on rims? Trust me I wish I did a week ago. I have heard AK can be a not nice place on tires and being out in the middle of nowhere finding a replacement is not "simple". When 1 tire fails, the other tire on that side goes into instant overload. It is common a few hundred miles later the 2nd one goes out. If you can stop almost instantly your chances of the other tire surviving are better, but not guaranteed. Adding years of age on the overloaded tire make it high odds it will fail soon.

Take pics of AK. From what I have seen from others it is really beautiful.
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Old 05-15-2018, 06:52 PM   #14
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnB View Post
How many miles in the 6 years? If it is in the 34,000 range like the bronze bushings...

6 years is not on your side, miles are most likely more than mine. My 2 cents, (your lots more cents) buy new tires before you go to AK....

Going to AK, do you have 2 spare tires mounted on rims? Trust me I wish I did a week ago. I have heard AK can be a not nice place on tires and being out in the middle of nowhere finding a replacement is not "simple". When 1 tire fails, the other tire on that side goes into instant overload. It is common a few hundred miles later the 2nd one goes out. If you can stop almost instantly your chances of the other tire surviving are better, but not guaranteed. Adding years of age on the overloaded tire make it high odds it will fail soon.

Take pics of AK. From what I have seen from others it is really beautiful.
Yes, the same miles and they have not been kind miles. I will take a new spare and an old spare on rims along with a second truck spare. I’ve been really lucky and I’d like to continue that streak.

Will take pics for sure.
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Old 05-15-2018, 07:39 PM   #15
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Wow! That is really scary! Glad everything worked out.
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Old 05-15-2018, 09:06 PM   #16
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So what went wrong with JohnB's tires?

As I mentioned above, my issue is clouded with a possible manufacturing defect in the tire itself. I cannot prove that is the problem so I keep looking for other reasons that at least add up.

There is a term called "Interply shear" which occurs inside the tire every time the camper makes a turn. It is an attribute of a tandem or triple axle non steering axle. Basically putting it, the chords inside the tire stretch during a turn creating interply shearing forces. The trailer tire scrubbing the road which is being dragged around a turn, is trying to tear the tire apart. The need of the tires and the camper loading is that the internal shear forces remain low enough in relation to the way the tire is made and sized to be able to "take it" and not come apart. When the forces become large enough long enough, the belts inside the tire fail and become detached from the tread and tire separation starts.

I'm not a tire engineer and do not claim to be an expert in this and I may have something not 100% correct in the above statement. I'm trying to learn too like we all are. See this link for more on "interply shear" by Roger Marble. And by the way, the pics in this link are from my failed 2012 Denman tires I cut up and sent him. RV Tire Safety: "Interply Shear" and other Techno Babble

And here is more on the tire scrubbing issue with diagrams. Scroll down to see the steering and scrubbing.
RV Tire Safety: Interply Shear

One way to keep the interply shear forces lower is to have more load capacity in the tire then the camper weighs and to run the max cold side wall pressure when starting out towing. Sunline was good to us in that they sized the tires to handle the entire loaded camper, yet the truck holds some of the load on the trailer tongue. However campers are not built equal on all 4 tires nor do camper folks load their camper exactly equal left to right or front to back. So you can end up with one tire being more heavy then the others. And since most of us use a WD hitch, weight is transferred to the trailer axles from the WD hitch. The only real way to figure out all this tire loading is to weigh the camper by each wheel with the WD bars engaged.

I did do a lot of weighing in 2012 when I had my first tire failure. So the end of the ST’s weights trying to figure out the problem and the start of the LT’s are the same point. I will list here the wheel weights and the amount of reserve capacity of the tire so we can see the comparison.



The goal at the time was to try and get the reserve capacity in the 15 to 20% range. Going from ST to LT did give me a lift in reserve capacity to at least above the 15% minimum. My weights have increased in the last year by 100# total weight spread approx 65% on the slide side and 35% on the door side due to needing to reinforce my camper frame. When I get the camper operational again, I need to do a weight recheck to make sure something else did not creep in weight wise.

The next realization is how many miles and how many years. The miles area is a complex one as raw miles is not the issue, it is the number of turns you make. Since we do not count the number of turns we make it is hard to back into that figure. I will generalize that taking 5 long camping trips accumulating 5,000 miles in 5 years is less stress on the tires then taking 50 short camping trips accumulating 5,000 miles in 5 years. All because of the turning done getting in and out of camp. Those of us who are weekend warrior campers fall into the short trip group and those who go cross country once a year fall into the other group. Through all our ST and LT tires life, we have been in the weekend warrior group with a lot more turns of the camper. Our prior home required I do a 180 turn after almost every campout on concrete to turn around during the non summer months. In the summer I could use the lawn. At least the new place I do not have to do that.

I feel from all my investigating my tires failed from the interply shear forces being too high for the tires I had at the age of the tire. Both areas need to be addressed.

I also should have been doing a tire spin test at least annually starting in the beginning of the 3rd year. If I had been doing that, odds are favorable I could of found the 3 failed tires I have currently before I ever made this trip this year. I learned the hard way that a visual short look at the tread face and side walls will not always find the onset of tire detachment in a LT truck tire. The tread just is not flexible enough to see it like I could on ST tires.

Here is what I am talking about with the spin test. I found one of the 4 original tires starting to bulge here in my shop “after” I made it back home and had 2 failures on the road.

A spin test is done by lifting the tire off the ground, placing a stationary object real close to the tread and sidewall and rotating the tire by hand to look for an out of round condition.

In my case I put the camper up on jack stands. The front right tire is the problem child. This is also the one that had the overload on the right front position when the first tire blew out. I had to use it to get home. See the block of wood under the front of the tire. It has a sharp edge and no rounded corner.


The yellow chalk marks the area of tread OD bulge. Here is the bulge just kissing the face of the tire.


The wood block is square to the tire the problem is, inside the tire it has started to separate allowing a bulged high spot on the outside of the tire. I can now see the face of the tire is not true flat across and that there is a high spot.

If I rotate the tire approx. 45 degrees the high spot goes away and there is a large gap between the board and the tire.


Here is a short video clip of the spin test on my Flickr photo site. We are having video upload issues at the moment on our site hopefully this will work for those who want to see it
https://flic.kr/p/HxGnZp

You do this spin test on the inside and outside sidewalls too. In my case I did not have any bulges on the sidewalls. Position a block of wood or something, spin the tire and look.




I demounted the tire from the rim and here is what is inside. The circled spot is the high spot. Yes, I have my own very old tire machine from my step farthers garage. It works well on steel rims such as trailer tires.


Now inside the tire


And touching it, it puckers and moves up and down as the tread is separated from the tire.


And putting a dry wall square across the face of the tire square to the side walls shows the tread is not normal. This is at the high spot. You can see some of the caulk circle there.


This is from the spare tire with about 100 miles on it. True across the face of the tire. Note. this tire is not mounted on a rim in this pic. There is some slight crown to the tire but the tire is symmetrical about the center of the tire and square to the sides.


As a comparison, see this ST tire of mine from 2012 with a tread bulge. No problem seeing them. I found this at a gas stop and changed it right then and there before leaving the rest stop.


The other tire that had separated was too far gone to see this effect. At least for me. A tire engineer may find something more pointing to the same end result.


The 4th tire did show the starting of a bulge on the tread but there was no bubble inside.

So that is the failures. Now to the what to put on in its place and to repair the damage.

Thanks for looking

John
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Old 05-16-2018, 08:22 AM   #17
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I don't know but if you look at heavy trailers their axles are even further apart really putting some flex on the inside tires like dragging they sideways through a large arc. Granted they a more rugged tire but it's all relevant to the size of the trailer. Frankly I would be afraid of your two other tires. How about showing them to a heavy truck/trailer shop I'm sure they have been there before.
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Old 05-16-2018, 09:41 AM   #18
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Originally Posted by mainah View Post
I don't know but if you look at heavy trailers their axles are even further apart really putting some flex on the inside tires like dragging they sideways through a large arc. Granted they a more rugged tire but it's all relevant to the size of the trailer. Frankly I would be afraid of your two other tires. How about showing them to a heavy truck/trailer shop I'm sure they have been there before.

Yes, the spread axle trailer setups are even worse. About 4 to 5 years ago the RV industry started adding "spread axle" to TT's. The thought was make the trailer track straighter and easier towing on 1/2 ton trucks. Those thoughts are true, but...

My first thought was, man, the stress on the hangers and trailer frame attaching points just went up significantly dragging the camper through a turn. And I looked as some of the brands when they first came out and they really do not do anything different in the hanger setup. I have not looked in the last year or so to see if they changed the hangers or reinforced them.

Now insert the tire scrub of spread axle. It is worse then the standard setup. For reducing interply shear this is going the wrong way. In my case and my weights I really would not want spread axle on my camper.

My other 2 tires.... trust me after the 1st 2 went out, I too was counting as many blessings as I could find to make it home and not have another one go out. Trust me, I will not ever tow on those specific tires again. They are shot, period. They are now in the recycle heap at NTB. I finished mounting the replacements and they are mounted and waiting to go on after I finish the body damage repair. More tonight on the replacements. We need to go camping this weekend. I have a deadline... Nothing like a deadline to get stuff done...
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Old 05-16-2018, 01:06 PM   #19
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John,

Do you know if ST tires are designed and built to handle "Interply shear" better then LT tires?
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Old 05-16-2018, 09:17 PM   #20
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John,

Do you know if ST tires are designed and built to handle "Interply shear" better then LT tires?
Hi Hutch,

That is a good question for many of the folks following along and me too...

I am not versed enough in tire manufacturing to give an accurate answer, however I know who can do better than I on it. I will send a note to Tireman9 one of our members and ask if he could explain it to us.

Stay tuned.

Thanks

John
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