What are your guys thoughts on putting trailer rated tires in a drive axle position. The specific tires im looking at doing this with is a Bf Goodrich tr144. Im sure it will work fine but im more concerned about the legal aspect of that?
pretty common across the south west.
Not a thing wrong with it. Under a high torque situation like pulling long grades or heavy loads I don’t know how they’d last. On my heavy haul highway trucks I ran a vocational chip/cut/scrub resistant all position tire and had the best luck of any tire I ran in a drive position. For a standard run of the mill freight truck I think it would be fine. Nice and quiet being closed shoulder and continuous tread design.
Will work well when headed out of turn two aiming for turn three trying to get around that swift. Truck Shop
Im going to put em on a dump truck. I see a pretty good mix of off road and hwy. Dump trucking in sw missouri is very hard on tire as we have alot of sharp flint rock hidden in soft clay soils. Slugging through that shred sidewalls! I got a good deal on them at $50 apiece mounted on rim. They are all date coded less then ten years old. Even as cores i figure i can get em capped and save a few. I realize they are not the best tread pattern for off road use. Still i think they will bo ok and get me down the road for a while. My big concern was can the DOT put you out of service for having them on a drive axle?
Also thinking i can take a tire grooving iron and cross cut the tread and make more of a traction lug! Any thoughts on that?
With MO weather, a fickle thing, do not believe I would consider trailer rated's on the drives, inability to properly or adequately channel water in heavy rains, unlike on a trailer where the truck already moved much of it, snow a DEFINITE NO, open side wall is a better consideration if looking to soft structure traction closed sidewall for wear. At that is up to the person running them, MO DOT I do not believe gives a crap so long as has tread and air.
I know what gour saying but to my thinking if its raining or snowing that bad im not working anyhow as we get shut down so we dont track mud out. I just need to get a month or two down the road and some revenue in so a proper set of traction lugs can be recapped.
Have you asked your tire guy how much he'd need extra if you left those tires and rims at his shop, and went home with 8 new recap drive tires? My guess, unless you have your heart set on those rims, is with what you have for value there, you're well over halfway there.
You need to check with dealer surplus in your area. We buy Goodyear LHS 399 steers for $325.00 each and and highway traction for $340.00 each. We buy these from a Volvo/Mack dealer. Surplus Truck Parts/ Freightliner Northwest had Dunlop highway traction for $350,00 each either way about $140.00 below tire shops. Truck Shop
A set of caps are $3000 thats a long ways from $400 not to mention they are mounted as far as traction only he knows what it will take on the job I'm sure nobody's ever run a dump on bald tires with the wires sticking though for traction lol
What in the hell kind of recaps cost $400 per tire? Bought a set for one of our trucks last summer, Bandag UltraDrive, IMO a pretty good dump truck tire, for $225 apiece. As far as my figures, I was assuming $250 per tire for the new caps, and that his good used would be worth $100 per tire/$50 per rim on trade. Yes I was also assuming he was capable of mounting tires.
I surely can't speak to a 10 year old till tire around here tires die an agonizing death of dry wrought by 5 years But trailer tread for drives is a common thing one of my transports has trailer tread on the drives the only thing is it rarely leaves pavement and when it does it gets stuck on an ant hill. If I was in any kinda snow I would run a drive tread no questions ask but I dont have those problems
I had 4 recap drives put on my dump in October. Tire guy came to my house, installed and took my junk tires. My total bill was $1050. I don't think I'd frog around changing tires now only to change them again in a couple months. Downtime has a cost too.
I am my own tire guy. I do all my own tire work and buy cores and take them directly to a recapper. They charge $145 to cap a 24.5 tall tire. After buying a core i usually have 160 to 190 in it. But the thing is i can controll what im getting as far as cores. I got sick as hell of getting bent over on tires by the local tire shops at $280 for a recapp and of course my cores were never good! And the tire they sell you for $280 looks worse than the cores they tell you are no good and then charge you 10 bucks to dispose of your supposedly junk carcass. I swear to god i have gotten carcasses back on caps they told me were junk and charged me for disposal. I have been doing it this way for 3 years now and my tire expense has been cut way down and my issues with blowouts flat went away! Not to mention my lost time for billable hours is down as well. I have tried the new tire route and even a cheap 300 dollar ish tire can be cut to shreds in this missouri rocks. It just does not pay to put expensive tires on a dump truck in sw mo!
Sounds like you need to find another tire guy, if that's possible. I guess we are pretty lucky around here, I've never had a blown out casing that wasn't my own fault.
Expensive tires might be what you need to save some money. When I ran dumps it was always Goodyear G-186 tires. Those are tough bastiges. And I ran in Volcanic glass and other nasty stuff that you may not have even seen.
Shimmy1 you dont understand! All the tire guus around here are crooked as all get out and all play the same ******** game. The only way around it is to take your stuff directly to a capper and have it done eliminating the middle man. Plus its hard as hell to find a tire shop with qualified help. Around here anyone thats worth anything has left for a market that pays better. All thats left around here is bottom or the barrel labor pool with massive personal issues and life choice problems!!!
I have 10 tires and wheels i paid $50 apiece for with 50 percent or better virgin never been capped tread. Only issue is they are trailer rated tires. If the dot does not give me crap about it then for the money i will win big being able to run them for a few months. Then for $145 apiece i can have them capped to a traction lug and get a good year to year and a half out of them. Even if i toss them after that because they are getting close to 10 years on date code im coming out big time win. How is anything i have heard so far better in price or reliability? Plus now i have 10 rims. I can get them shot peened, magnafluxed and powder coated for $25 apiece? They look like brand new when they are done! Like i say this method has worked very well for me. Cost is way down and blowouts and down time due to tires is long gone. I guess this is an area where there are many many opinions and everyone has their own method that works for them. I wasent trying to start an argument on which method or way was best. I just wanted to know if i wad gona get put out of service with trailer rated tires in the drive position. From what im jearing the answer to that is no so i know which way im going on it!
You have never rolled in 115 degree heat new tires have a hard time in this heat let alone recaps the side of the freeway in July has a lot of separated tires decorating it What do you get out of a set of tires 6 months maybe 9 on a dump truck in that environment eventually you have to buy new tires or are you only sourcing used tires
This is the same story I hear all the time from outfits that buy cheap tires and expect 5-6 recaps on their own tires... Aint gonna happen. But they are all crooks.
Apperently you have never trucked in missouri? It gets pretty dMn hot her in summer also! Last year was a real schorcher. And yes i usually buy used tires where i can for cores. Main thing there is i can controll what im getting for my carcass and thats the key to recaps. I wont buy it unless its a virgin within about a 3 to 4 years old. By the time im done i always have under $200 in the tire and its got a quality carcass i know is good!
I've also given up on recaps workshoprat92. My tire man never wanted my carcasses, and at 250 for a recap ($50 for a carcass + cap + mount) I'm not very far away from new tires. And the last caps I got had terrible carcasses. Weather checked, gouged sidewalls, I even got one that had a big boot on it which I found when it blew out. I only send the guys to the tire shop if I'm not around to mount up something else. I've gone to mostly buying new and mounting them all myself. I've got a wholesale place near me, that I can get pretty good drives around $300-325. They're tires from overseas, but not much isn't anymore. Truck shops price for goodyears is way lower than we would find here, I think here they'd be close to $400 each. You probably buy enough tires or parts from them you get a pretty good cut? There's a guy in Springfield that I've had decent luck in buying used regrooved virgin tires for trucks that I don't use much, or for spare tires. He's a carcass buyer, and regrooves some too. I wouldn't want them on something heavy that I use everyday, but for occasional use, or totally replacing tires on something I'm going to sell, its not bad $ spent. He's usually $70 or so a tire. If you're buying 10 tires that's only $700, vs spending $3500 for all new. A rebar or shot rock doesn't care what the tire cost. And I really don't like having more $ in tires on a old truck than what I spent on the truck. But the crane's I've given up on caps, I just can't get good tires, and you'd think with all the trucking outfits in springfield, there would be tons of good carcasses, but there's not. So usually any more, I'm running new tires on my everyday stuff, or regrooved virgins on my seldom used equipment. If you want the number for the guy in springfield I get the regrooves from, PM me.
I always feel lucky if i can get 2 caps out of a carcuss. Usually by the second the sidewalls are trashed from missouri rocks. I always start with virgins. And in 10 years all my carcases were no good. Not even one and im not supposed to think they are crooks? I never have a problem with anything i take to an out of town capper but here in town o.g every core i own is junk! Yes they are crooks and im keeping that statement clean lol!
I guess all can say is sorry for stirring the **** pot. I know heat raises hell with tires, and my tire guy will not send anything to the retread shop that is more than 5 years old, not even your own tires you want to get back. Like I said, I guess we're just lucky to have an awesome tire shop 20 miles away.
Around here its common to see trailer tread on drives in the construction/ blacktop trucks. Most of them dont run much past end of October so the snow traction is a non issue. The off road traction is still enough to get by. Cheaper tires are not allways the answer to high tire cost. Making a driver mount there own tires would help bring tire cost down.......
Yep I know you know exactly what im talking about on the springfield area crooks. Wingfoot over on chestnut was doing great for me on recaps. Well over a hundred tires with them and not an issue one with the tire. Then they changed managers and again all of the sudden all my cores were unacceptable. Now i go to a place in kansas city. Suks to have to go that far but im just not going to let the guys here rape me anymore! I tried the new $300 chineese tires and they didnt last 4 to 5 months before they were bald. A couple of them chipped out so bad the cords were showing and not cappable! What does your core buyer get for a core that not over 4 years old?
Your ok man! Its just amazing how it differs from area to area. I never had this problem when i was based out of denver co.
He's kind of vague about what he's buying them for, and what he gets for them. He drives all over and sometimes I think the cappers try to stick it to him a little and just don't buy anything from him, and then he's sitting on a bunch of tires. He always seems happy when I buy some regrooves from him, but I will say the last two I got from him, weren't any good, one had a zipper/crack in the sidewall, and the other was a really really cheap tire, but I sent one of my guys to pick them up as spares, and the guys aren't nearly as fussy as I am. Now I've got to make another trip to springfield, trade him out the two bad tires, and he'll give me two others, but its just the time to swap them that kind of bothers me. While we're talking about caps- My local tire shop buys them from Springfield, and they are seamed caps. Its what they keep on hand, and they don't have a lot of choices on what shows up as carcasses. I stopped buying them when the bad one with a boot blew out on me, I took it in and told them it should have never been capped. It wasn't very old, and the "refund" I got on it, was a $50 core discount for the carcass on the next cap. It was my last cap. Anyways (sorry I just needed to spill it out while I was thinking about it- I'm still a little steamed) I was talking to a guy the other day, and the only caps he will run are a one piece cap, says he has much better luck with them. Anyone else run one piece caps or have a real preference on caps?
Also- he regrooves tires, anyone else ever do this? I've never seen it done, and I'd think it would stink to high heaven, and be a tedious job.
The caps i was getting from wingfoot are not one piece and i could always count on them to run till bald. Only time i ever had a problem with them was driver error or stupidity or damage from road or jobsite beyond my controll! I have learned the success to running caps is quality control in your core! Buying local caps and taking the chance on the carcasses they were giving me had a large failure rate as you also know. As soon as i started getting my own carcasses capped that i purchased with my quality control and standards my blowouts and tire downtime entirely went away!
I wont run them, period. When I ran grain trucks I got tired of rescuing one per week or so because of a crap tire.
Get enough flats when tires get worn out, regrooving would just make that worse I would think. If we run our tires down too far, they get rock-drilled and then they won't cap. FWIW, we only run caps on the sidedump tractor (because of the high risk of running over crap), and the trailers. If a guy is 100% highway miles, regrooving might work.
When I ran vocational trucks we ran caps exclusively. Usually we had a couple pallets full of cores and fresh ones to rotate through. Sometimes when we could not wait we would just core swap for whatever they (Les Schwab) had on hand at the moment. We got all sorts of weird Chinese and rotten cores that way. Some of them we capped 2 or 3 times. Sometimes they got rejected but not usually. Never had a one piece tread that I knew of. Never had a blowout or separation that I knew of either. Although we were a lot of stop and go and mostly in winter (propane) so the tires maybe did not have such a chance to get all hot on long drives. Also 2 or 3 caps may not have been many miles, all the sharp turning scrubs them down I think. They certainly did have their share of bad roads though, more than once I had a fist size rock ram right through the center of the tread and lodge there wrecking a tire.
Single piece or around here called ring tread are the only way to go for recaps in my opinion but they cost another 50 bucks if you have high quality cases it makes sense or when I was on the farm running trucks tires would go 6 months 9 at the most I could get 2 caps out of them those dirt and gravel roads ate tires alive Now days I got away from running them none of my trucks put on 40000 miles a year so are tires dry wrought and blow out before we wear them out especially if you are up around gross weight in the summer when. The pavement is 140 to 150 degrees those tires get real hot most caps dont like that temperature that's were i have seen most fail The case buyers around here sent want anything over 2 years old most cal shops wont cap a case over 4 years old in these parts I buy virgin now on everything I do my own tires and if I have 215 bucks into a ring tread cap that's already 3 years old then I will lose money cause I wont make 3 years on it so I am ok with spending 300 to 330 on tires that wont give me issues for 3 to 4 years
A tire that had 100 psi cold in a 115 degree heat after running at 70 mph will have 130 psi. And casings are worth about 65 bucks apiece and that's if those are not rock drilled Truck Shop
I never heared of caping a tire more than one time. I dont know were are tires go to be caped but we have had good luck with them on trucks that do short local hauls. On our long hauls they stoped useing caps it cost more than they saved.I have used them and will continue to you have to do alot of things to make it somedays. If i needed tires and i had trailer tires i would run them.
Twenty-plus years ago, capping a tire more than once was unheard of. In the last 5 years or so, with newer technology and better processes, along with the capability to x-ray carcasses, recapping is a whole lot better than it used to be. The heat is still an issue, but we don't see near as much of that 100°+ as some of you. I have an uncle that has been running caps on his hopper trailer for 3 years now, which used to be unforgivable due to damage when you threw a cap. He runs Bandag B197 caps, which are a little thinner that some others. They end up being about a 100k mile tire, which for a cap AND on a trailer is not terrible. I also think the thinner cap is a little more tolerable to the heat. We don't run second-time caps, but that's because by the time we wear out our own tires, they are almost 5 years old, and our tire shop will not sell 2nd timers off the shelf.
Bandag STL has been known to brand the number of times a carcass has been capped on the side label, do not know if still do that. Have seen '4s' on a local dump truck from that suppliers.
You get what you pay for on cheap tires and caps. Our rigs pack a steady 100,000 GVW, a set of Toyo 177 steers are $432.00 bucks mounted and those last about 60,000 miles. Michelin's- average 115,000 to 120,000 $475.00 bucks, Bridgestone -100,00 same price roughly, Goodyear 399's 100,000 to 105,000 our cost after mounting $365.00. We had some Goodyear drop axle tires 265's I think that ran 240,000. For drive tires Double Coin 400's average 170,000 miles. Caps on super short haul rigs well I guess. But when you loose a cap the destruction of trailer can be costly. Not to mention the poor sole who hit it with his car. Tires in our shop are checked with a gauge every service Half our trailers run auto air up. I have 1,152 trailer tires, 480 drive trires, 120 tag tires and 120 steer tires to watch after. Tires off-tires on everyday right along with brakes. We have a 53' trailer at the shop full of tires all the time. Truck Shop
the first 13 axle michigan train i saw with 50 tires my first thought was wow tire salesmans dream repairmans nightmare
Company I’m driving for runs nothing but Michelin on trucks and trailers they will occasionally run Michelin caps on the drives but trailers are all virgins said it was costing them to much with spreads tearing the caps off got 400000 out of the drives on my Pete running team between Laredo Texas and Champaign Illinois this freightliner wont do that it has 420000 miles on it and on it’s 3rd set of drives I believe had caps on it when I got in it they just put a full set of virgins on it last service
Our boss would order new trucks with all street tires. When we got them we would take the new tires off and throw them on a pile and use them for steers. When steers got worn out we would cap them for drives several times over as I noted before. 2 to 3 times per casing IIRC. If we ran short of good casings then we would buy caps on casings from the tire store. Never laid a finger on a new drive as long as I worked there I think. Again ultra short hauls for us, YMMV. I never had one come apart, it was always rock damage to tread or sidewall. No ring treads, always with a splice. Actually there might have been one casing failure on another guy that I heard about. Never a tread/cap failure. As Doug said, you do what you got to do. I would do it again if I was in trucking. It worked for us. Trucks averaged about 11 miles to the hour of engine run time. Would hit 65 mph maybe once a week.
Kiss your traction good bye...after a few weeks of towing your truck around....you ll be begging for new tires