One thing i recall from my tyre fitting days, you almost never needed anything much in the way of weights to balance Michelins.
Juddian:
One thing i recall from my tyre fitting days, you almost never needed anything much in the way of weights to balance Michelins.
True.
When I had influence in tyre purchase, I always used Michelins on the steer axle. “Second life” Miches went on drive axles but it was a toss up what went on the trailers. It would have been nice to use a premium brand but trawling through scrap yards and quarries didn’t do much for damage limitation. Usually ended up with Toyo or Bridgestone when they were first hitting the market but having got established their prices were not much different to others. Did try Bandags for a while but they didn’t like too much high-speed motorway work. Maybe Bewick wasn’t affected by this, what with him running Gardners! 
the tires of choice up our way ( both companys ive worked for have them fitted ) is Michelin green x on the steers fitted and balanced on the truck. and bridgestones on the drives and trailers. Had Michelins fitted as OEM on a tridem dump I hauled and the tires were wearing bad until they were pulled off one wet day and bridgestones fitted then the wear was minimal. When I first started (the older family members were pulling back and letting the younger members upgrade the fleet)on the gravel trains they were fitted with awful Chinese tires ,anyway at the start of the season I was having to change one /blow up near every morning anyway one morning I was pulling out of the quarry loaded and a couple o them just started blowing off (honest I was running legal weights) and just sitting another went on the other side (trailers were twin axles )well that was me stuck and to find a local dealer the quarry boss phoned up my gaffer and told him about a small local guy he used for tires for the company trucks . So he turns up wae a crane truck and the deck covered in tires ,he just hooked the crane on the back trailer lifted the rear and him and his boy changed all 8 ,then he dropped it moved forwards lifted the middle and changed another 8 .well I was well chuffed .tires were at the time a new make out our way Kuhmos ,well he looks at my drives and says when you come back in give us a shout and we will come back and retorque the trailers and fit a set off kuhmos on the drives!!. Back at the yard the young boss comes out and tells me the kuhmos were as cheap as the Chinese but with a full return price if they didn’t last a certain milage . THey were the best tires I ever had on a trailer ,were still on the trailers when they were sold 3/4yrs later ,and for the drives I just wish they could still get them ,never once got stuck in the quarry or in our yards what a tire for mixed highway /quarry work. just a note my running mate had Michelins on his drives pulling a single end dump and the "side walls were softer and in his own words “his arse bit the seat” more than once when keeping her chapping to get a run up from the flat to get up the Miami escarpement .
Retired Old ■■■■:
When I had influence in tyre purchase, I always used Michelins on the steer axle. “Second life” Miches went on drive axles but it was a toss up what went on the trailers. It would have been nice to use a premium brand but trawling through scrap yards and quarries didn’t do much for damage limitation. Usually ended up with Toyo or Bridgestone when they were first hitting the market but having got established their prices were not much different to others. Did try Bandags for a while but they didn’t like too much high-speed motorway work. Maybe Bewick wasn’t affected by this, what with him running Gardners!
Hi ROF,SoM trailers all used Bandags where possible,I recall delivering and then collecting a Tautliner with quite a load of trailer tyres from their Wigan site taking back to Manchester depot,don’t know what happened to the trailer,as I then started my 3 change over night duty to Garstang,not sure of your comment over Bandags not liking high speed motorway mileage,you had to be going some to keep up with a Smiths motor,Gardner or ■■■■■■■ powered!
David
I’ve got to say that those first Bandag treads didn’t look very appealing from a visual aspect but they didn’t do a bad job on the trailers but we mainly used the ZZ pattern which looked far better and they did us very well in service on Tractor drive axles. IIRC we stopped using Bandags in the early 80’s but not because they were unreliable. Cheers Bewick.
5thwheel:
Retired Old ■■■■:
When I had influence in tyre purchase, I always used Michelins on the steer axle. “Second life” Miches went on drive axles but it was a toss up what went on the trailers. It would have been nice to use a premium brand but trawling through scrap yards and quarries didn’t do much for damage limitation. Usually ended up with Toyo or Bridgestone when they were first hitting the market but having got established their prices were not much different to others. Did try Bandags for a while but they didn’t like too much high-speed motorway work. Maybe Bewick wasn’t affected by this, what with him running Gardners!Hi ROF,SoM trailers all used Bandags where possible,I recall delivering and then collecting a Tautliner with quite a load of trailer tyres from their Wigan site taking back to Manchester depot,don’t know what happened to the trailer,as I then started my 3 change over night duty to Garstang,not sure of your comment over Bandags not liking high speed motorway mileage,you had to be going some to keep up with a Smiths motor,Gardner or ■■■■■■■ powered!
David
Hiya David I bet SOM didn’t remould those super singles off those Highway tandem axle trailers ! Cheers Dennis.
Interesting thread!
I seem to remember that when power steering came in, steer axle tyres started wearing unevenly and Michelin evolved a steer tyre with two large water drains instead of the zigzags. This was supposed to alleviate that uneven wear.
Most of our trailers at Caravan Trading in Dammam (that was ‘ships of the desert’, we didn’t move caravans) were originally American and on cross plies. They gave reasonable service, and at first we had a steady supply of ro-ro trailers coming in from the States to swap with our own. If you did blow a trailer tyre on the Riyadh run, it was easier to take both wheels off and chain up the axle since these were American spoked wheels. Obviously that only worked if the load was reasonably light, but there was no ‘ministry’ to pull you over, so we did as we pleased.
While I was still running my own truck I bought 4 Dunlop cross plies to put on the drive axle, which wore very well, but they did ‘bump’ on the flat spots first thing in the morning when you were loaded. I always liked Michelins on the steer.
By about 1982 the work off the port was almost all containers and we had also developed internal work from local factories (Arabian Fibreglass became a big customer), so the supply of free tyres disappeared.
By then I was transport manager at Caravan, and had sold my truck to the company. I had a visit from an Austrian, who had come to Saudi on spec to see if he could sell tyres he was buying in Hungary. I think they were ‘Taurus’. I think I bought about 16 to try them - they were exactly the same zigzag tread pattern as the Michelins and they wore very well, so I bought our tyres from him after that, and I think we became his best customer in Saudi.
After a couple of years he asked us to try some ‘Sava’ tyres that he was getting from Yugoslavia. They also had the same zigzag tread pattern. They weren’t as hard wearing as the Taurus, but they were cheaper, and Caravan were still buying them when I left IIRC.
John.
Hi all,back in 94 we had a tyre fitter he knew it all he would put recuts onthe drive axle of the tractor units when you had an 18 tonne coil sitting in the middle you would spin like hell old man Raymond couldn’t understand why tyres were changed every week until he found out the new ones were in the back unused and old ones cut he soon got rid of him Nigel the young tyre boy did a brilliant job after him no more recuts ,also Cardiff transport only ran Bridgestone as he never had any issues with the tyres cheers John
A very interesting thread as fleet tyre management has always been very important to me. I think that Michelin was regarded as the premium brand as long ago as the 1950s. My mentors bought a new Bedford S-Type in 1958 (914 CTE) and it was specified with 9.00 x 20 Michelin X tyres. Radial tyres were not very common then and the Michelin X was a new design. The Bedford did over 100,000 miles on that set of tyres, a mileage that was virtually unprecedented then.
Using re-cut tyres on drive axles was a NO NO as I found out quickly when I re-cut the four tyres on the drive axle of our first artiv, a 26 ton Mastiff. They were OK to run off on trailers but I eventually realised that other than the odd cut on the edge of a tyre from time to time it was false economy to carry out full re-cuts in an attempt to extract a greater mileage form a case. All that was achieved was to increase the failure rate of the cases that were sent for either Bandag or Remix process. The other killer of cases as far as I was concerned was Auto Lube systems in particular the front axle tyres. When these wheels were removed and re fitted to say trailers to run them off which could take a while until they were then removed for re process it was then that many of them were rejected as a result of earlier oil impregnation which wasn’t evident after they had been run on trailers. It was the British built units that benefitted from the use of Autolubes whereas the Scanias and Volvo did not require such care! Cheers Dennis.
5thwheel:
Retired Old ■■■■:
When I had influence in tyre purchase, I always used Michelins on the steer axle. “Second life” Miches went on drive axles but it was a toss up what went on the trailers. It would have been nice to use a premium brand but trawling through scrap yards and quarries didn’t do much for damage limitation. Usually ended up with Toyo or Bridgestone when they were first hitting the market but having got established their prices were not much different to others. Did try Bandags for a while but they didn’t like too much high-speed motorway work. Maybe Bewick wasn’t affected by this, what with him running Gardners!Hi ROF,SoM trailers all used Bandags where possible,I recall delivering and then collecting a Tautliner with quite a load of trailer tyres from their Wigan site taking back to Manchester depot,don’t know what happened to the trailer,as I then started my 3 change over night duty to Garstang,not sure of your comment over Bandags not liking high speed motorway mileage,you had to be going some to keep up with a Smiths motor,Gardner or ■■■■■■■ powered!
David
We were on vastly different work to SoM, David! Maybe the problem with the Bandags was indiscernible damage in quarries, steel works and scrap yards. Whatever the reason, we experienced tread separation on Bandags when motorway driving at high speeds, particularly in summer weather. Twice I recall checking in my mirrors and spotting a whiff of smoke from a trailer tyre. Both times I stopped before it got terminal and found that the tread had started to melt. The tyres were returned to the dealer who swopped them for new Bandags without quibble. Luck of the game, I suppose.
P.S. Bewick didn’t want his lorries to run too fast, what with the increasing price of fuel!
I’ve got to say ROF that the Bandags did us a good job and they only ceased being used by us because I changed our tyre policy to just purchasing new cases and then selling off the worn ones at the end of their first life. Because we looked after and took great care of our tyres I was able to get top prices for the worn cases particularly the Mich X’s and ZA’s. While the Bridgestones and the Toyos didn’t command the same case prices as the Mich they were a bit cheaper to buy initially so the sums balanced up in the end. I started buying Yokahama 1100 x22:5 tyres for the tandem trailers as well as many Bridgestones the Yokahamas gave excellent service IIRC and were very reasonably priced ! . Our Tri axles always came shod on Mich or sometimes Goodyear and then they were eventually replaced with mainly Bridgestone which proved to be an excellent tyre on the tri axle bogies. The worst tyre wear we ever experienced was on the front N/s axle of five wide spread tandem axle C F’s we acquired when I bought out a Pal’s business the wear on these tyres was horrendous even though they only operated on clean surfaces. Cheers Bewick.
It is interesting to read that Michelin were seen as the tyre of choice. No one yet has mentioned Dunlop. Any reason?
Did anyone bother with axle and steering alignment checks? I was always told that ‘perfect’ alignment made a big difference to wear and also fuel economy. I guess that the advent of the tri axle trailer probably had a greater effect in that regard…
FodenS80:
It is interesting to read that Michelin were seen as the tyre of choice. No one yet has mentioned Dunlop. Any reason?Did anyone bother with axle and steering alignment checks? I was always told that ‘perfect’ alignment made a big difference to wear and also fuel economy. I guess that the advent of the tri axle trailer probably had a greater effect in that regard…
Running a large fleet of Foden eight leggers the steering track was checked at the first sign of tyre wear with a Dunlop optical alignment guage and the two steering axles aligned using a wire down the side. However the nearside second tyres always wore the most, kerbing/scrubbing when turning and general rough site work contributed to that. Grooves were recut regularly, but not too deep or the casing would be scrap and we always tried to get our own casings back when they had been for retread.
Pete.
FodenS80:
It is interesting to read that Michelin were seen as the tyre of choice. No one yet has mentioned Dunlop. Any reason?Did anyone bother with axle and steering alignment checks? I was always told that ‘perfect’ alignment made a big difference to wear and also fuel economy. I guess that the advent of the tri axle trailer probably had a greater effect in that regard…
My boss has all his trucks axle and steering alignment done every year before we head out to camp says it pays dividends also has steer tires balanced on the truck ,I was a bit wary but having had my old truck “done” the difference in steering feel was amazing. He also has the trailers checked also has the pin checked as well, only a dozen 6x4 dump trucks and 6 6x4 artics not a big firm but a cent saved here and there makes dollars over the year.
Here’s a sales leaflet for the Mich XZA ‘power steering’ tyre from the mid-80’s. It was recommended they were fitted in pairs on the steer axle, not just a sales ploy by Michelin to sell more tyres, but because fitted singularly made the non XZA side wear unevenly. It’s fair to say that correct pressures and alignment would always make tyres last longer. My boss would always tell people that they would have their car tyres balanced, so why not their truck tyres.
There was a period in the 70’s when you could order a spare wheel with a trailer. Then on making further enquiry’s it was found to be possible to order TWO spares with each new trailer 
and the OE price was a lump less than buying a new wheel assembly from a tyre supplier ! IIRC I managed to order about 12 new CF tandem axle flats with 24 Michelin 1100 x 22:5 spare wheels and tyres ! Until someone at Mich wakened up ! and pulled the plug ! ■■■■■■■ ! Then it was made a rule IIRC that unless the trailer had a spare wheel carrier fitted no loose wheels would be supplied ! Oh! now that ■■■■■■ up the price altogether plus we didn’t carry spare wheels on our trailers past about fleet No. 8 so it was good while it lasted 
Cheers Bewick.
Michelins were without doubt a great Tyre but as time went on the firm became such arrogant ■■■■■■■■ which, I believe, drove many of their “dyed in the wool” customers away, me being one of them ! I will relate a true tale about how smug and arrogant they became in another post but it sure summed them up at that time ! Cheers Bewick.
Remember one day the Michelin rep called in to see me and he was raving on about a new directional tyre they had just created and he wanted me to try a set, they had arrows printed into the walls of the cases so you put them on facing the right direction of travel well for a start they only had about 8 to 9 mill tread depth brand new so was not too sure about this, anyway we had a set at a price we could not refuse and they duly fitted these to a 400 Scania 4x2 unit which was almost new with one driver on it all the time but he didn’t half cover some ground and to be fair it was a lot of straight line work on motorways, we gave them a light recut on the drive and they did unbelievable mileage in the end about 280,000kms the problem being they were so good they never put them in full production as Michelin would not have made any money.
Another point IIRC going back the tyres you bought would take a good cut without fear of hitting any cords as the rubber was deep, is it me or did the thickness get less as the manufacturers got more greedy, just wondered if I am on me own thinking this, cheers Buzzer.