Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Replacing Tires due to Age?

Just a little fact about rubber used in tires, rubber in it's raw form is very sticky and will easily stick to itself and other objects. It will air cure over time and harden . Vulcanizing or curing with heat will set it to a non-sticky state that we see in a finished tire. However the curing process continues over time very slowly . Time (and weather including sunlight) is the enemy....

I have a brand new full sized spare under my pickup. It's now 11 years old and has never seen the sun. They tell you to rotate them to use the spare and replace all 5 at once but who actually does that? I'd be afraid of using this at high speed after all these years, new or not.

I put a set of ProComp MTs on my 79 in about 2005. Drove it for a couple years and parked it until 2016, out in the back pasture in the sun. All 4 were still up and holding air after 10 years sitting. I fired it up and drove it to work for about 3 months until I could afford a set of new Coopers. Figure they were dry rotted pretty good when you could twist lugs off on pavement when getting on it.

Tire buddy ordered us a set of these, should be in by the weekend!

https://www.discounttiredirect.com/buy-tires/pirelli-scorpion-verde-a-s-plus

I bought an old single axle office trailer with probably 10 year old tires that were so dry rotted you could see daylight thru them. Only driove it two blocks to the tire store.

Just sits at the deeer lease and now on about year 6-8 on the newer tires. I towed it about 50 miles to the new lease 2 years ago with a lot of pucker factor. Only about 4500 pounds but It’s really tongue heavy and no brakes. Will replace tires before moving it again.

What CIK said

Don't waste money on Michelins if only putting 24K on in 8 yrs!!!!

Mike

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I am over 80 years old and I need my tires replaced.

then you will be re-tired!

kind of a pain, but could you block the trailer up and remove the tires, store in basement or whatever?

I started removing the tires from my trailers for added security.
I spend a lot of time away from home and it was bugging me a little as to how vulnerable my trailers were.
It's the boats, the dump-bed and the cargo trailer which can become a storage unit of sorts at times.

This stuff is easily stolen and most hitch locks can be defeated. Which can be a good thing since I sure as hell have lost the keys before and had to cut the locks off.

With a good floor jack and a impact wrench it just takes a few minutes to have any one of them on the road.
All it cost me was a few concrete blocks
I have taken notice as to what great condition my tires are staying in being stacked in the shop, no UV damage from the Florida sun at all...

On a side note, I also took notice how interchangeable some of the wheels are, I really might not need 6 sets of trailer tires at all..I just doubt I am going to be using my dump-bed at the same time as my cargo trailer and suddenly need to take one of the boats some where....hummmmm

Maybe new tires should come with a manufacture date embedded in them.

I wonder just how old some of the new tires I have purchased may have been.....

I guess we could have bought econo tires and saved $200-300. But that really doesn't amount to much over the course of 4 years which is about how long I think we'll keep the vehicle. No doubt these will be the last set of tires we buy for it.

And hopefully they are good tires and maybe provide better traction than the econo's.


And rather than leave it sit outside all the time we can park it in the garage more often.

Yep.. Inside storage is the key to longevity.. All my trailers are stored inside my bigger pole shed and only come out when I need one.. Only exception is the camper - but even that one is outside only 5 months a year; the remainder of time it's also inside that pole shed...

Thank GOD I had the foresight at the time (1980) to build a 40X96' with 14' clearance inside...

That's gotta be nice, not applicable in my situation. I'm parking on a unbuildable 50 x 400ft easement.
Only other location is between the house and the bay and I am not gonna obstruct that view.

They do, and once the public caught on that some tire shops were selling two year old tires, the tire industry went to a new code more complicated for the public to crack.

It's always nice to learn, thanks...

To find your tires age you need to find the DOT Date Code on the tire. Find the raised DOT letters and numbers. Look for 4 numbers together, often enclosed in a raised oval. The first two numbers are the week the tire was manufactured, for instance in the example below, 35 stands for week 35. The second two numbers are the year the tire was manufactured. In the image below we see the 07, indicating the tire was build in 2007. This particular tire was made the 35th week of 2007.

These codes are not difficult to read. They are difficult to find.
I have an Infiniti and a Nissan pickup. For each vehicle, the spare is a different make from the road tires, so I have 4 different makes of tires.
I just went out to check the dates, and in every case the date is on the inside of the tire, which makes it very difficult to see.



This is the spare of my Infiniti. It was made in week 37, so, September of 2015. Four year old tire, not bad for a spare.
They have been using the same code for at least the past 8 years. Obviously it is federally mandated because the numbers are all the same size, about 3/8 inch high.


My pickup spare tire, I just bought this one two months ago, manufactured January of this year.