Where the Rubber Meets the Road
Proper spec’ing will keep tires in service longer. Highway tires are no match for the mean city streets. Photos: Jim Park
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Proper spec’ing will keep tires in service longer. Highway tires are no match for the mean city streets. Photos: Jim Park
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Maximizing tread life is all about the contact patch — literally where the rubber meets the road. Pavement is abrasive by design. That’s how you get friction between the tire and the road surface — in other words, traction. But excessive friction or uneven contact between the pavement and the tire will cause tread to wear away faster than you should. It’s important that you do all you can to keep your tires running straight and true.
Before we get to alignment and pressure management, let’s look at the tires themselves. Rib-type treads will generally wear longer than lug-type treads because there’s less movement of the tread blocks between the body of the tire and the road. Lug treads can squirm and wiggle under load, and that movement translates into scrubbing, which as the word implies, scrubs away tread rubber.
Deeper treads squirm more than shallow treads, and thus wear away faster. It may seem like tires with deeper tread last longer, but that’s only because there’s more rubber there to begin with. But if you measure tread loss by miles per 32nd of an inch of rubber, you’ll notice that deeper treads wear faster when the tread is new (deep) and the wear begins to abate as the tread becomes shallower.
Tread rubber compounds can affect wear rates, too. Compounds are often tuned for specific applications and wheel positions.
“Tread rubber compounding affects tread life in a variety of ways, and significantly influences tire performance attributes such as tread wear, rolling resistance, resistance to cutting and chipping, and traction — all of which play a role in tire tread life,” says Gary Schroeder, director of commercial vehicle and global OEM sales for Cooper …Read the rest of this story
