Friday, April 20, 2012

Tire Troubles

We are pretty fanatical with safety and inspections and do a walk-around at each stop when traveling, which includes a visual check and heat check on the tires.  At literally our last stop on the way home from FL we noticed cracks in the sidewalls of the tires.  More pronounced on two of them, but they are present on the other two as well.   These are Trail Americas with a manufacture date of 2011.  We keep them inflated properly, don't have crazy weight added to the trailer, and even keep the tires covered when in storage.  So, yeah, it looks like they're just crummy low-quality cheap tires.  We also aren't the only Visa owners with tire woes, so apparently this is one place where Gulf Stream skimps (though in researching it sounds like this is common to most manufacturers, editing to add that we've found a boating forum with similar complaints on boat trailers with Trail Americas.)  They also have a  reddish oxidation thing going on where when you rub them, the rub mark is Redfish brown.  Not sure what that means.

So, anyway,  we determined that it was safe to continue home, but we researched and ordered new, better tires toot sweet.  We have 4 Maxxis M8008s on order.  It will be nice to be running on radials.
We both decided not to even bother replacing them under warranty since they would more than likely just give us direct replacements of the same quality (or lack thereof!)