<VV>Tire "aging"

[Tony Underwood]

At 06:40 hours 08/15/2006, BigD wrote:
>Last week, my coworker was driving his 1970 Hemi R/T convertible home


...a Genuine '70 Dodge R/T Hemi ragtop??   Holy dollarsigns!


>on 9 year old tires,


Never should have done it.   Even I know that this is a bad 
idea.   Nine years old?


>when the left front tire separated without  warning. He was doing 70 
>and the tire ripped through the inner fender  and caused damage to 
>the fenders paint (and wheel). I guess he found  the limit the hard 
>way. Now he's trying to figure out how to get the  body on this 
>special car fixed without loosing parts at the shop.


That car deserves special treatment, such as a big name shop that has 
a 24 karat reputation.     Anything else is taking a chance...  which 
is a sad reflection on society in this day and age, considering that 
this car is likely worth six significant figures and is a *great* 
candidate for theft.

Now:    It's likely a lesson well learned that it's poor economy to 
run a car like that on tires that could come apart from age, 
particularly considering that now the car is damaged and repairs will 
end up being considerably more than what it could have cost to keep 
the car in fresh tires.

I could see running old tires on a daily driver/beater, but that sort 
of car...?   I wouldn't wanna take the chance.     Besides, all it 
takes is a good inspection; a tire ready to do something bad will 
show you its intent.   There's gonna be cracking, bulging, 
something.    Every time I ever had a tire do this sort of thing it 
cosmetically advertised the fact before-hand.    I was dumb enough to 
ignore the warnings and drove on them anyway and learned the hard way 
each time.  :)  ...such as that trip in 2001 to the Ft Monroe site of 
that year's VA Vair Fair, had a great looking tire on the '67 coupe 
(tires were on it when we got it) come apart on the way.  It had 
shown some slight but visible cracking between the treads but 
otherwise looked fine, showed very little wear.    Then before I 
could get the rest of the way there running the spare on the driver 
side rear, the passenger side rear began thumping, which mandated 
that I go pretty slow the last 50 miles, took an extra hour anna half 
to get there and fortunately the thumper didn't come apart before we 
made it...  bought fresh tires for the rear while there, the budget 
suggested that we take a chance that the fronts (all four tires same 
brand/age) would be OK since they were doing fine and didn't work as 
hard since they didn't carry as much weight as the rears, still got 
rid of them when we got back anyway.

By the way, the '67 coupe still has the same bias ply spare it came 
with from the factory (judging from the date code on the tire and the 
body-color rim it's mounted on) which worked fine the whole way it 
was run, about 170 miles.    I guess they don't make 'em like they 
used to...  ;)

For that matter, my '60 4-door has what appears to be its original 
spare tire as well, has that "washboard" edge to the outer sidewall 
and still has very good tread, some slight sidewall cracking but none 
between the treads, only used it once and it worked fine, drove on it 
for about 20 miles.   I know it's ancient but it stays in the car for 
spite's sake if nothing else.    Being in the trunk for almost all 
its life probably has much to do with its survival.


tony..