[Motor31]

Long post, sorry.

We got our tires mounted and hit the road last week. We did have one glitch. The tire wear on one tire was due to a bent axle. The same axle and location that the Goodyear store in Wichita jacked up, using the axle rather than the spring shackle location when I had a flat at the last rally they held in Wichita. Since it’s more than a year down the road there is no way I can get them to cover it. Lesson learned, do NOT let a tire store jack up the trailer unless they do it to my specs.

I got the tires from the source that Wingnut posted. Great guy to deal with and all tires are recent (04/10) manufacture. I went with Goodyears. The Michelins were only $5 more but the 62 MPH rating was not a good idea. I called the factory rep and they told me that the rating was solid and they did not recommend using it even at 65 MPH, which is my normal cruising speed. I do get faster on downhills and drive a lot of hot area roads too. He was less than knowledgeable about the warranty covering damage to the trailer if one blew. He did not want to say that tire damaging the rig would be covered. I have had good luck with Goodyear over that issue on an older trailer that I was not the original owner for. The Goodyears are rated for 75 MPH.

Here is another part of the story. Those of you with 17.5” tires check the wheel manufacturer. It’s part of the casting or a stamping on the inside (inside being the inside of the trailer position not inside to the tire) portion of the wheel so you have to crawl under the rig to see it.

We had the Chinese version, “Vision”. They do have a rep in the US but they are not a lot of help on technical info. I spent an hour at a Discount tire store (3rd place I went looking for tire stems) while they checked their inventory and called around looking for stems for me. They called the commercial places as well as the manufacturer. No luck.

The tire stems are located on a rounded portion of the rim. There is no flat surface for the stem gasket to mate to. They originally used a very thick gasket in the shape of a “top hat” and squashed the hell out of it against the curved surface of the rim to seal it. That is an inside curve at that location so the gasket has to seal before the metal base of the stem contacts the wheel and cocks it off to the side. No one had the same thing to replace it. No one had a high pressure stem that would fit the hole either. The manufacturer rep suggested a large thick base rubber stem be used but that is only rated to 100 psi. When that was pointed out to them the guy said no problem, he’s never “heard” of one failing yet. Since I know that a hot tire will get up to 140 psi when started at 125 cold I was not going to use that option. I figure a working pressure almost 50% higher than design specs is a bad thing.

I ended up at a tire / wheel trailer specialist in town. They had no gasket that would work on the inside. They did have a thin wall “top hat” style gasket that would fit on the outside of the rim and below the tension nut on the stem. I used the old gasket and the new one as a back up on the wheels I swapped out. That same nut is a 14mm nut and I had to go buy a long socket and grind down the outside wall of it to get it to fit inside of the tire stem hole to get to the nut. That location is a tight fit!

I used the best of the old tires on the bent axle as there was no time to replace it before I had to go to Washington. The trailer axle folks said that it would still wear the tire but not enough to replace it for this years travel. Next winter we will replace it in Tucson. No sense in ruining a new tire on that spot so the new one is on the back of the truck in a tarp for now. After 1800 miles I see no major wear on the inside rib of the tire. All the tires are holding pressure too. Estimated replacement cost of the axle, with a new Dexter unit and my old brake equipment mounted is under $600.00 including labor on a one day job. I can handle that.