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Check your tires, fellas!

Almost no rubber is used in modern tire making. Mostly petroleum based synthetics. Commercial trailer tires are not designed to go Passenger car mileage. They are designed to carry a load and not at high speeds. Different application. Like comparing a diesel engine to a gasoline engine.
You can exercise and stay out of the sun, watch what you eat, keep lean and you will still die when you get old. You can stretch it out a little but you can't last forever.
I respectfully disagree Leo. Commercial trailer tires are speed rated, just like a passenger car tire. If properly maintained, a commercial trailer tire is good for well over 100,000 miles. A 16 ply trailer tire, which is all that is used in heavy haul and specialized applications, can last even longer. And that is carrying loads in excess of 40,000 lbs on a daily basis. Air pressure is key, especially in the hot summer months. Very rarely do I ever change a trailer tire because it is worn out. Usually it's due to a blowout which I can almost always trace to a foreign object or a tire defect.
 
No electric motors in continuous use.
The Coker rep told me that extreme temp changes and prolonged freezing temps kill them. My building is not heated.

I’m not sure I buy that, but that’s what he was saying. He says to take them in the basement during storage season.
 
Modern day BF Goodrich has really been mostly a Uni-Royal green tire using BF Goodrich molds since Michelin purchased both companies about 40 Years ago...
I thought Coker bought the rights to BFG Radial TA and we’re making them in MX? I switched to Coopers for modern radials in the 14/15” stuff.
 
Bought a pair of these, on a no-return basis (spec tire series that folded), and cheap.
Sidewall cracks within 15 minutes of first airing. No date on the tire, of course.

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I thought Coker bought the rights to BFG Radial TA and we’re making them in MX? I switched to Coopers for modern radials in the 14/15” stuff.
Coker was a family owned business in Tennessee until they sold out to an investment firm in 2018. Coker Tire was given manufacturing rights by the original tire brands, and also has acquired many different tire molds of the original obsolete tires they manufacture.
That's from their Wiki page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coker_Tire
 
These tire threads worry the heck out of me. I have a set of BFG Radial TA/s that I bought at a tire shop years ago. (These are not Coker repops.) They have about 5K miles on them, but are 18 years old. My Dodge stays in an unconditioned garage. The tires look like perfectly brand new tires. No cracks anywhere to be seen. Still holding 32-PSI, no problem, after I last checked them 7-8 months ago. I read the horror stories, so am concerned about keeping them. But my car gets very limited local use on secondary and country roads. It is also hard to pony up big bucks for another set when these look perfect. I guess I will hang on until I start getting time to drive the car more, and start driving long distances to car shows and cruises, etc....
 
No matter what brand the fronts carry the load and take the abuse. I keep a eye on all of them but the fronts get replaced at 5 yrs. Rears I will run until I see a problem.
 
The new Good Year tires will show checking when only a few years old and even with low mileage, they make garbage now a days.
 
Fill them with Nitrogen, Keep the weight of the car off of them over the winter, deflate them to 10 psi.,
and When you're not driving the car, cover the tires so NO U.V. gets to the tires. U.V. really kills them
fast! The Nitrogen keeps the compounds from drying and shrinking. Yeah, I know. Alot of B.S. to go through!
 
Here’s a Cooper that was 13 years old and blew out on the highway. The car was vibrating a little when I first started driving it that morning. I decided, stupidly, to ignore it, just a flat spot, it’ll fix itself. The highway driving was a short trip, the vibration got worse. While coming up to 4th off ramp, Kaboom! I hit the shoulder right away and slowed. Up the ramp the car crawled and on level ground the spare was installed. There was minor damage, Damn lucky. And yes I’ve gotten new jack stands to replace the 3 leg ones you might notice in a photo. The vibration was not an out of balance tire, I should have stopped sooner but I reckon my head just wasn’t into it that day. Well that’s my confession, I spent a lot of money those next few months buying new tires. This car, another muscle car, a car trailer, my work truck and the wife’s. Boy did I stimulate the economy. Did it hurt my back pocket, hell ya, but now It’s all smooth sailing.
Happy Cruising, haywire 440

8A5CFA68-B729-4757-84BD-EB794EA62748.jpeg 4A5BA100-9D00-423F-BE27-B0573BDF82F8.jpeg 63AB4B8E-BD14-4DA9-AFEC-DAA80281C684.jpeg D4C5AD0E-9816-4016-A4A6-4CB7E64B89A3.jpeg 22581A3B-9498-4ECD-AAE8-7B035E4027B4.jpeg
 
I knew mine were fine but I went out and looked them over anyway....

Right rear.
20200910_181919.jpg

psycho.jpg
 
What a lot of people fail to realize is that an odd sized/brand of tires could be a year or even 2 years old before it reaches your possession.

This happens with popular tire sizes also. I knew better and overlooked the date on the last set I bought. They were four years old.

It's not always what you can see, like cracks. It could be what you don't see like the inner cords. No way would I run 30 year old tires no matter how good they looked.
 
Just for the record, BF Goodrich T/A's are owned and produced by Michelin....
Coker has sole distribution rights.
At least, that's what the website says....
 
The point was missed on commercial tires. They will get high mileage Because they are not made the same as a standard "B" load range passenger tire. They are also much more expensive for and equivalent tire. The value of the load being carried on a HD comercial tie is not usually cheap. A 16 ply Rated tire is usually inflated to over 110 PSI. Not exactly a lot of flex happening on that tire. It is the heat generated by the flexing of the tire as it goes from a circle to a flat spot at the point of ground contact . The harder the rubber ( you do know that tires get harder with age, The reason a racing tire goes hard and Durometers are used at the race tracks to check the tires after a short time) and the lower the air pressure, the more the tire heats up and the faster it spins the more centrifugal force works to peel the tread belt from the carcass. Witness the hi-ways during the Summer months when the boat trailers and Motorhomes that are parked for years are taken out on the Hi-ways for vacation. Littered with blown-out tires.
 
Of their vintage design tires.
Wut?

Oh, by the way - doing a lot more research than seems prudent, seems like that whole Coker Tire
exclusivity stuff is horsehockey - you can obviously buy T/A's in LOTS of places, including Tire Rack
and even WallyWorld.
Further, if it's important to some folks, the 275/60/15 size is made in Mexico and the 295/50/15 is
made in the USA.

It was also interesting to read (well ok, maybe just interesting to me :) ) about how despite Michelin's
buying Uniroyal and BFG meant those companies got whipped into Michelin shape at the time, they
didn't do the typical throwing out of all the existing management in doing so, with several longtime BFG
folks staying on with the company afterwards.

Wonder if they ever solved the "brown letters" issue they had on the T/A's?
 
Witness the hi-ways during the Summer months when the boat trailers and Motorhomes that are parked for years are taken out on the Hi-ways for vacation. Littered with blown-out tires.
Dunno about elsewhere, but in these parts, highways are littered with carcasses of bad semi rig recaps. :)
 
Almost no rubber is used in modern tire making. Mostly petroleum based synthetics. Commercial trailer tires are not designed to go Passenger car mileage. They are designed to carry a load and not at high speeds. Different application. Like comparing a diesel engine to a gasoline engine.
You can exercise and stay out of the sun, watch what you eat, keep lean and you will still die when you get old. You can stretch it out a little but you can't last forever.

my fleet of 200 f-250 / transit connect and t-250 are not big rigs and my drivers are like Richard petty
 
Auto Transport Service
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