Today's PSA: Beware of exploding truck tires!

[jmowreader]

Lately I've been noticing much more Truck Tire Shrapnel on the roads. I figure that since diesel is as expensive as it is, some truckers are choosing to defer the purchase of replacement multi-hundred-dollar tires until the cords are showing--which isn't real safe, because worn-out truck tires come apart into large, heavy chunks. Which makes it incumbent on us who drive low-slung cars to watch out for thirty-pound pieces of rubber flying through the air.

[blue sky at night]

1. Good Post...

when passing a big truck, don't sit there for Five Minutes...get on it! Not much you can do if it pops while you are going by, but something to think about. I have noticed more rigs on the side of the road, broke down also...welcome to bushworld.

[coriolis]

2. Another good reason to not tailgate big trucks!

...

[rocktivity]

3. Tire scraps, I call them

And I tend to see more of them at the beginning of the summer, for some reason.

:headbang:
rocknation

[NCDem60]

7. Here's the reason you see more at this time of the year.

Trucks run recaps on their trailers. The biggest enemy of recapped tires is heat. As the temperature warms any tires that were put on over the winter months that had a defect begin to fail. The tire really doesn't explode. The tread separates from the body of the tire, sometimes in chunks and sometimes in a full piece like a doughnut. Depending on how much weight on the tire the body may stay inflated for a short time. All those pieces of tire you see littering the road are pieces of the recap.

[HereSince1628]

4. Are there still 'split-rims' on commercial trucks?

chunks of rubber can indeed ruin your day, but a split rim can avoid that problem by decapitating you.

[jmowreader]

8. Yes, there are...

I can only think of two ways you could mount a truck tire--a split rim or a bolted-on rim, and I've only ever seen bolted-on rims on Humvees. There'd be no way to get a truck tire on a one-piece rim like you have on your car--they don't make tire irons fifty feet long.

[mvccd1000]

12. Maybe 1%....

Split rims went out decades ago, with the advent of Budd wheels and Uni-lug wheels. Even on the old wedge-style hubs, most rims are no longer split rim. I don't think I've seen a single one on the road in the last 10 years or so, but I suppose someone, somewhere, must have an old enough truck to still run them.

No reason to use 'em; most tire places won't go near them, and nobody sells them anymore. Truck tires are mounted just like car tires, they just use a bigger machine.

[catnhatnh]

5. Not a bad warning but your causation is off....

bald tires don't have any 30lb chunks left.The normal cause of tread separation is heat due to overinflation or overweight....both encouraged when money is tight and diesel fuel costs more than plutonium...overweight can pay the bills unless you get scaled and as tire pressures increase rolling resistance lowers and fuel milage rises....I'd expect to see some increase in tire "failures" this year....and my people refered to them as "gators" as in "Gator in the slow lane northbound at mile marker 42"...

[jmowreader]

9. I should have posted this last week

Last week, I was on I-95 in Lumberton, about halfway between exits 20 and 22. A guy was in the right-hand lane hauling a load of shingles on a flatbed, when one of the outside right-side tires on his trailer decided to come apart. This wasn't any "tread separation" thing--the sidewall failed. He pulled onto the shoulder and I followed him over just in case he might want a witness statement. (He did.)

I cannot imagine the damage that would happen if a tire exploded against the side of your car.

[limit18]

6. It makes the tailgaters

back off for a while.

[NNN0LHI]

10. Those thirty-pound pieces of rubber in the middle of the road are to keep drivers alert

Pretty effective too.

Don

[backscatter712]

11. There was a Mythbusters episode on this.

The myth was that an exploding truck tire could decapitate or otherwise kill someone.

So they got a truck, did all sorts of things with the tires - weakened them, ran them with low pressure, until they finally got one to explode with Buster next to it. Buster was unscathed - as a fragment didn't actually hit him, but they got footage of big flying pieces of tire shrapnel on the high-speed cameras, and used that to calculate the velocity of tire shrapnel.

Next, they used a dynamometer rig to fling one of those pieces of tire at the measured speed at a ballistics dummy with a pig spine in it, right through a car window. KER-SMASH!!! Yep, took it's head off.

Myth Confirmed.