Tire Maintenance Tips
Periodically checking your tires is strongly recommended to ensure full safety to you and your own car. Tires are fundamental for our safety but if you ask someone how does he care of his tires he’ll probably won’t know what to answer if not “I just replace them when they’re worn out”.
This is not the best you can do for your safety: paying attention to your tires is just a matter of habits and doesn’t cost you a single buck, you should really be doing it.
This is what you should do:
Tires should always be inflated as suggested on the service book of your car. This will also make your tires last longer: driving with underinflated tires reduces the contact area between the thread and the ground because the central part of the thread is pushed upwards so the edges will wear faster, moreover an underinflated tire causes high fuel consumption and produces vibrations and noise. Keeping your tires overinflated will cause the central part of the thread to wear faster. A correct inflation grants you and your passengers the best safety in any standard driving condition. Tire pressure should be checked each 2-4 weeks and before any long trip.
You should often check if your tires have damages on the walls. These damages happen hitting the pavement with a tire while parking. This can cause the tire wall to present bubbles and cuts. If your car has been exposed to hot and cold weather you could also find cracks: you might find cracks even if your tires are old; old tires should be replaced as a safety measure even if they have enough thread left.
Make sure that your tires wear regularly: rotate the steering wheel to the extreme right or left and check if both the edges are equally worn. In case you notice tires are more worn on the inside or outside go to a garage and let them know, they’ll fix your tires alignment.
Tires have wear bars: when the tread lugs are worn to the point that the wear bars connect across the lugs, your tires are fully worn and you should take them out of service.
Most tires have a rotation direction shown on the tire wall, make sure your mechanic mounted them correctly
Tires are made to rotate in that direction, opposed rotation could be dangerous in case of rain or high speed.
Front tires wear quicker than rear ones due to steering while parking and braking weight effect. This happens even more on front traction cars. Rotating them will make them last longer and in better shape, otherwise you’ll have your front tires fully worn and your rear ones still in good shape. You can to this yourself or go at your usual garage and have them do it for you.
If you own several tire sets you’ll always have some tires to store somewhere. Wrong storage can damage your tires. Store your tires in horizontal stacks. If you store them vertical they will tend to get oval shape.
As you can see there are few things to care of regarding tire maintenance, I hope you understand the importance of tires in good conditions: imagine if one of your tires exploded while you’re driving on the highway and think that you can do something to prevent it.
To learn more about tire maintenance view: Tire Maintenance Tips
Joe Stanton is a car enthusiast and one of the authors of JustCarDeals.com, a website with excellent automotive deals selected by car enthusiasts.
Written by Car Enthusiast on April 27th, 2007 with
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