The Big Wheel Retreads That Are On the Highway

Most rig tires are retread many times. When their time comes and theyre riding down the road at just the right speed, the tires can delaminate as whole chunks od the chord and tread just tear loose. Ive seen some close calls on the Pa Turnpike when some truck loses a big roll of tread and the truck sort of bounces up in the air, once the tread is released, it acts like a small missile for a while. They can cause body damage if theyre moving.

What is scarier, Boss, is the thought of a true blow out. As FM points out, most of these deposits are peel-offs. If a true blow-out occurred, if the entire tire separated, there is a much more critical danger, in that the rim on which the tire is mounted is at least a two-part structure, and it's "disintegration" would produce a projectile of truly deadly proportions. The actual effect of the use of retreads, which will peel off while the vehicle is in motion, is to prevent a much more dangerous situation. As it stands right now, most injuries which occur from the separation of the rim are suffered by some poor, minimum wage smuck in a tire shop who didn't know what he was doing.

I work with trucks and truckers. People get killed by flying tire/wheel bits more often than most people realize. There was a bad run of these incidents in Ontario a couple of years ago. The police do a lot of truck inspection blitzes now, specifically related to this. I know that some states are more rigorous in their inspections than others. You definitely want to encourage any hint of increased truck safety inspection.

I try to steer clear of the large trucks on the highway. You never know when another retread is going to let loose.

dont they use a cage to mount rig tires? Ive heard of fatalities from actual explosions and turning the wheel rim into a missile or the tire chunks beheading someone. I thought this cage protects the workers.

I believe they do use the cages now, FM--and i've been told by someone who took such a job (any job is better than no job) that he switched to pizza delivery when he learned the cages prevent fatalities, but not necessarily injuries. What is criminal, is that the cages were only introduced after 60 Minutes and other such "muckrakers" exposed the situation--it went on for about 50 years with no safety measures imposed.

Those truck tires on the highways are quite dangerous for others, especially, when you drive over them. (They can have rathersharp edges - and average speed of some cars on German autobahns is 100mph and plus!)

BTW: I heard the bursting of a truck tire once, when I overtook it.
And years back, I stopped a truck, whose brakes/tires had just started burning.

so the real purpose of the cages then is to better identify the victim eh?

Walter, would love to be able to cruise at 100 mph. But, mostly, our roads suck over here.

Head for Canadia, Boss--the highways ain't no better, but if you ain't speedin', you don't fit in . . .

Well, you can do so (= even much faster) here quite often ... on all motorways without speedlimit (a couple kilometers are left) between 10 pm and 5 am.

iin Canada once
I hit a moose in my truck
what he was doin in my truck, ill never know.

glad to hear you survived that, farmerman.

My first day in Spain a few years ago, I was driving a rental car and cautiously crawling up a windy road through an olive grove as a large tour bus was coming down the hill towards me. One of its back wheels came off -- not just the tire, but the whole damned assembly. (How is the possible? I have no idea.) It rolled rapidly down the road towards me as though an invisible giant were playing that old-fashioned hoop game. I didn't know what to do... a big bus taking up all the space on my left, an impressive drop-off on the right and an upright wheel headed my way at an incredible and accelerating rate of speed. I aimed the car directly at the wheel and it hit the center front of the car. The impact made the wheel bounce high up into the air. We craned our necks forward to watch it above the windshield in what seemed eerily like slow motion. Then it came down, only to bounce way up high again and fell, finally, into the ditch, where it stopped. This all happened in the space of 20 seconds or so. The back of the car I was driving was also bashed-in because the woman driving behind me hit us from the rear as well.

I don't know why I was so lucky, but when I'd picked up the rental car, the only automatic they had left was an 800 series BMW. As a lame-ass American woman driver, I had insisted on an automatic even though, yes, I do know how to drive a stick. This was the first and only time I've driven a BMW, but I became an immediate fan. The accident bashed in the Beemer front and back badly enough that it couldn't be driven, but my daughter and I were fine.

I know... this has nothing to do with what this thread is really about... but it was a big wheel on the highway.

Today I drove down to Van Zandt County for 1st Monday, a gigantic flea market. The three highways I traveled on I-30, US 80, and I-20, had many tire hunks.

Driving back I was think why, after criss crossing the US East to West and vice versa, North and South I had never seen a truck loose the retread.

Then I remembered one morning driving out of Atlanta, GA, west in my itty bitty white car I suddenly noticed the biggest 18 wheeler in the world (that is how it looked to me) was moving quickly into my lane.

As spead up to get out of the way all I could see was smoke and cars twisting and turning in my rear view move. It could have been the rubber leaving the tire.

In the last month I have been to Austin Texas and Oklahom City, OK and lots of rubber huniks. No blowouts or blow up did I see.