Never drive on old tires (with pictures)

I replace my BFG’s every 6 years no matter how good they still look.

Cool Turbo-wheels, Lou!

Thanks Rocky !

Yup whenever they are available, which is basically never. Got one 17" set a year or two ago and haven't seen any since. Hoosier and Pirelli Collezione just aint my cup of tea. So I just terrorize the neighbors just riding around the block on 20 year olds till they ever become available again.

Here is an eight year old tire on a Pantera (not mine) that exploded at highway speed, and the damage to the Pantera.

John

That was Larry Benson's car and what isn't noted was that there had been a plug installed at some time which allowed leakage between the casing and the tread causing a de-lamination.

I'm glad no one got hurt but the damage to the back of thar Pantera looks awful.

Tires get taken for granted until they fail and a lot of people might not understand that old tires can be more dangerous than worn out tires.

Here's an article on how to read date codes for tires made after 2000.

https://danthetireman.com/blog...ire-dot-numbers-mean

If the date code on your tires indicate prior to 2000, it doesn't matter what the age is, they're way too old to be driving on.

As we all get older, the years seem to go by faster and it's easy to forget how old the tires are on our cars that don't get driven all the time.

Damn, this is an expensive thread. Finally looked at my date codes. I knew the tires were old, but extremely low miles. Looks like I was living on borrowed time: one set was 2003, the other set was 1304.

This my not be the optimum time to mention it, but....cast magnesium wheels are still close-to-state-of-the-art for performance cars  But they flex while being driven, like all wheels do, And with cast magnesium, the resulting stresses never go away.... until they combine with mag's porosity to form a crack or an actual broken wheel. But we have found a way out.

We can anneal the wheels in your kitchen oven. Annealing temperature for cast mag is only 275-300F for about 3 hrs, followed by VERY slow cooling. This should be done every ten years or so. I got the idea from our Navy who fly fighter jets with magnesium wheels, After l00 hours of use, the military anneals their wheels during major overhauls, or throws them away if chipped.

When I worked for Lockheed Aerospace, I verified the info..This stress-relief should also be done if a lightly damaged Campy or Halibrand wheel is TIG-welded. The only drawback is, the 300F temperature will turn the protective chromate-based undercoat paint a tannish color, so you will need to repaint your good-as-new mag wheels. You need not strip them to repaint, though.

Powder coating is often done at 350-400 F and that will anneal Campys too if you cool them down slowly. There are a LOT of annealed Campys running around the US these days

I lost tread on BFG T/A's only months old. They would not warranty them because of the tire size to rim width.

On that particular set THEIR chart said that size would fit 6-8" wide rim. The rims were 6".

They said the rims had to be 7" in contradiction to their own charts.

Bottom line, don't expect much from BFG. It's a cheap tire.

Do a Google search for retread tires. As a teenager we used them because the treads used in recapping made them like racing slicks AND they were $21 each in Floyd's Department Store.

Now I remember also recapping Goodyear raised white letter Polyglass tires and the tire date of manufacture didn't matter.

Lots of commercial airlines use recapped tires for the planes also, so there is definitely something else going on with the significance of the quality of the tire to be recapped.

I'll also point out that there are STILL racers using 30, 40, 50 year old racing tires in vintage racing. So what's going on with this?

Those "old" tires being used by racers are only do-able at Bonneville when running true race tires with 50-70 psi on moist, forgiving salt. And it's only done because Goodyear and others mostly stopped building Bonneville-specific tires. Sometimes, they only get one (1.0) run of 5 or 9 miles before tire tread failure. It doesn't work well with street tires from Wal-Mart or Costco.