The other day I was looking at the tires on Ginny's Rodster and noticed they were starting to turn brown. I cleand them up and checked them over and found good tire depth and no cracks. I mentioned this to Jeff Classic. This AM he sends me an email about tire age. Upon further research the Hedgehog stays home this weekend. Ginny's tires are about 9 years old. Uncle Sam and most tirand auto makers strongly suggest replacing tires that are more than 6 years old.
Tire Aging
June 2, 2008 NHTSA Issues Consumer Advisory
SRS efforts lead to NHTSA Consumer Advisory warning that aged tires, regardless of tread, are subject to greater stress increasing the likelihood of catastrophic failure. SRS has called on the agency to issue an advisory since 2004. “While this doesn’t solve the tire aging problem, it is a significant step toward improving information available to consumers” said Sean Kane, president of SRS.
Tire tread separations took center stage in 2000 when the Firestone / Ford debacle surfaced. Investigations into this tragedy led to findings that all of the recalled tires met federal safety standards, which were originally written decades ago when radial tires were still a rarity. Following the recalls of millions of defective tires, Congress passed the TREAD Act, which required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to promulgate new regulations in order to prevent another widespread tragedy.
In addition to tread separation defects, one of the areas of tire safety that is a particular interest to SRS is "aged" tire failures (see below).
As of June 2, 2008 SRS has documented 159 incidents in which tires older than six years experienced tread / belt separations—most resulting in loss-of-control crashes. These incidents were the cause of 128 fatalities and 168 injuries. We have also included an additional 10 cases involving tires older than five years at the time of failure (half of which were more than five-and-a-half years old at the time of failure). These 10 incidents account for an additional 14 fatalities and 24 injuries. This list represents incidents that SRS has identified primarily through a survey of litigation, which is one of the only publicly available sources of these incidents.
My Google search was: Tire age.
I also, found out that some retailers will sell a tire as new even if it has been in inventory for many years.
How do you tell the age of your tires?
http://www.tirerack.com/tires/tirete....jsp?techid=11
Mike
Check your tires..
Threaded Mode
