Thread: Tyre wear study - FYI

Hi all, put some D687's on the 18" compomotive rims about 2 years ago. tread depth new was 10.7mm, I measured 3 positions across the tyre inline with the tyre valve. For consistency I will use measurements from outside of rim, centre, inboard and the first letter is Front/Rear, second letter Right/Left.
So, at a subsequent service and tyre rotation I measured again.
FR - 7.0,7.0,7.0 - FL 7.0,7.0,7.0 - RR- 7.0,7.5,7.0 - RL-7.0,7.5,7.0 So, quite happy with that. Can not actually say how many km traveled in this instance because I was swapping back and forth with the original 20" tyres trying to wear them out, but the car was at 83,000km or so. I did note that the centre of both rear tyres were very slightly up on outside wear. Pressures generally during this phase were
Front - 200kPa round town and 250 kPa country and towing. Rears 250 and 300 kPa respectively, all cold inflation.

The car is now at 120150km and this is what I have found for the rears, have not got to the fronts yet.
RR - 2.3,4.4,2.7 - RL-2.1,4.1,2.4 Interesting that the outsides have worn more than the centre on both tyres. I have for the last 10,000km upped my pressures when towing to 350kPa on the rears but have kept the same for city and 300kPa for country not towing.

I guess the initial thought is that at 250/300kPa the city/country pressures might be a bit low so I guess I will have to experiment on the next set though I have been watching the pressure increase over cold inflation and it seems to be in the general 30 ~ 40 kPa ball park increase. I certainly notice the increase in small bump harshness with higher pressures around the city, but in the end that is also the nature of the LT construction, not a single tyre issue on a recent 8000km treck through Innaminka, Birdsville and outback Qld, so swings and roundabouts.

Anyway, just for interest.

Peter

So here is the info for the fronts. These 2 front tyres were put on new at 83500km and the car has now done 120150 as per above. FR - 4.3,4.7,4.4 and FL - 4.8,5.8,5.1
FR looks good and so if we said that the average tread depth across the tyre was 4.5mm, and the original depth was 10.5mm then we have used 6.0mm of tread. The vehicle has traveled 36650km, hence about 6100km per mm of tread.
FL is a bit more of a mystery. Perhaps a slight wheel alignment issue but also original tread depth was 10.7mm so would expect slightly more tread remaining. I will have to think about that one.

Peter

I built a simple spreadsheet(a few years ago when I used to work nightshifts ) to track my tyres actual kms - I rotate between 6 tyres so its not as simple as saying they went on at XXXkm's and changed at XXXXkm's (from the odo) and that's how long they lasted. Currently I've done just over 50,000km since purchasing my current Toyo AT's, but each tyre has only done between 30,000-39000km on the road. Started off with 13mm of wear and down to 6-7mm now at last measure. Works out around 5000km per mm of wear, and average potential tyre life (to 2.5mm left on tread) of around 55,000km each tyre.

Its defiantly overthinking it all, but I just like the info side - and if I swap between different brands in the future I've got something to reference and compare