This month we are indebted to Tyre Safe as they have produced a guide to the types of wear and tear that you might experience either on van tyres or truck tyres and if not addressed will undoubtedly be a problem for truck management services to manage and often a call out for a mobile tyre fitter either for maintenance or worse in an emergency.

There are a number of different types of wear and tear that we encounter on a daily basis and for the experienced eye, spotting them could identify an issue that can easily be addressed.

1. Shoulder wear - Typically wear to the shoulder of a truck or van tyre occurs when the tyre is travelling straight ahead while the wheel is pulling to one side. It causes a feathering effect which can be felt either on the outer or the inner edges of the tyre depending on whether the wheel is pulling inwards (known as toe-in or outwards (known as toe-out). It can be made worse by the camber of the road.

2. Sloped wear – This is generally smooth to the touch and can have several causes but is usually caused when the weight distribution of the vehicle is unbalanced by excessive camber. It can also be caused by hard cornering, overloading or a bent stub axle.

3. Rounded wear on a truck or van tyre is caused by under-inflation or overloading, which produces a heel and toe effect whereby the leading edge of the contact patch is compressed, and the trailing edge is rasped off as the compressed patch is dragged along the road.

4. Centre wear - The opposite effect happens as the result of over-inflation, as all the heat caused through friction with the road passes solely through the central third which is in contact with the road. Here a slight deflation will spread that load across the full face of the tread of the truck or van tyre so that its lasts much longer.

5. Irregular wear - Irregular wear is a common cause of failure in our monthly pictorial round up of commercial tyre failures and can be caused by a number of factors including loose wheel nuts, incorrect twinning, poor wheel balancing, faulty brakes or suspension and irregular tyre pressures to name just a few.

6. Eccentric wear - Eccentric wear is more common as a truck tyre problem than you think.  It is usually the result of a tyre that has been eccentrically fitted to the rim. This can also be caused by worn stud holes or severe imbalance causing the wear to have an elliptical rotation resulting in more pressure or friction on certain parts of the tyre.

7. Localised wear - Something that we see every month in our ‘Tyre trouble’ news articles.  It occurs when only one part of the tyre has been affected. Potential causes could be testing on a rolling road, a frozen axle, locked brakes, assembly imbalance, structural damage or failed repair.

Whatever and wherever the issue appears for your commercial tyres, Tyrenet’s roadside mobile tyre specialists will be able to quickly help with our 24 hour emergency truck or van tyre service.

 

In case you have missed them, our monthly pictorial roundups show a selection of the call outs our mobile van tyre fitting and truck tyre road service specialist tyre fitters are called out for.  Here are the latest editions:

 

February Tyre Troubles 

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgements:

Our thanks to Tyresafe for the information about Truck tyre wear.