Blowout!

[Fifty150]

I was @ Sears getting tires installed on The 5150 Mobile.  A tow truck brought in a car with a blowout.  Nothing special......except that the tire was so new, you could still see the Tire Tread Markings.  It looked like the car just had the tire installed, drove out of the shop, then blew out.  

[Fifty150]

5150 on the rack

[Mike Chell]

Two times I've seen that kind of blow out:

Operator error ... the driver had driven too close to a divider wall, perfectly "sanding" down the sidewall without taking out the rim.

Installer's error ... using too much pressure to seat the bead upon installation.

 

Of course, it COULD be manufacturer's defect, but that actually the least likely scenario.

[Fifty150]

The hardest part would be to get the installer to admit fault.  It would be easier to prove a manufacturer defect, before the tire shop tech owns up to mistake.

 

 

[Mike Chell]

Most tire places won't even argue that kind of damage to new tires.  It's way too easy to eat the price of another tire.  Much easier than the possible lawsuit that would result otherwise.

 

I'm pretty sure a lawyer would go for "mental anguish" and be asking for millions to pay for the life long chauffeured limo.  Due, in no small part, to the fear of  driving that the customer now feels.

[dinocarsfast]

Why do you think the tire was a blowout?  Blowouts are rare, this looks like the tire was driven on while it was flat, way to many drivers today are too stupid or too lazy to replace a tire and then they are not repairable like this. 

[Beta Don]

I agree  -  Looks like a tire that was driven very low on air.  Many times people see they have a low tire and it's smoking hot and they fill it up and think they're good to go, but they will very shortly have a tire that looks just like this one.  Overheat it, damage the carcass and you're riding on a ticking time bomb

 

Don

[Fifty150]

Interesting observations.  To me, the most interesting part of all, is that the tire was brand new.  

 

Went back there again today.  The girl who installed my new tires yesterday insisted on holding onto the best condition tire, so that I can come back with a wheel for her to mount it on.  She was right.  It is always safer to have a spare tire.  I've been driving that truck for over 10 years without a spare tire.  She was out of the shop, so one of the guys mounted it for me.  When I got home and looked at it, I started laughing at the ridiculous amount of wheel weights it took for him to balance the tire.  I've never seen anything like it. I've seen a few wheel weights here & there.  But never that many.  Not being a tire tech, I don't know.  Is that normal?  

[Mike Chell]

Nope ... not normal.  Take it back and have a real technician do the job.  The mechanic who did that has used weights to balance weights, meaning he/she didn't know what they were doing. 

 

There should NEVER be weights opposite each other on a rim.

[Beta Don]

8 hours ago, Mike Chell said:

Nope ... not normal.  Take it back and have a real technician do the job.  The mechanic who did that has used weights to balance weights, meaning he/she didn't know what they were doing. 

 

There should NEVER be weights opposite each other on a rim.

A dynamic balance usually requires weights often placed opposite one another, but usually some on the inside of the rim and some on the outside.  The pictured wheel looks like all the weights were placed in the same plane, even though the machine was probably calling for some on the inside and some on the outside . . . . obviously, the operator didn't know what he/she was doing

 

Don

[Fifty150]

I've never mounted & balanced a tire in my life.  But any idiot could see that there is something wrong with that picture.  

 

I have heard that with aftermarket alloy wheels like that, they use stick on wheel weights on the inside of the wheel along the center 0 degree offset line; no lip on aftermarket wheels to hammer on traditional weights, hide the weights from view to make it look better, because of various offset configurations the best balance is from the center line........  But that could just be misinformation spread by people who don't really know any better.  

 

12 hours ago, Mike Chell said:

 Take it back and have a real technician do the job. 

 

 

 

 

Nope.  Not going to take it back to that same shop.  Obviously, the shop tech is an idiot, and the supervisor is not doing a good enough job of overseeing that kind of work.  Why give them a chance to argue, try to defend what they did, and screw things up more?  I'll just take that somewhere else, where they could first laugh at me, then fix it.  No big deal at the moment.  It is only a spare tire.  And they didn't charge me for it........which is probably why they let some apprentice use it for practice.  

[davidparker]

I agree, that is REALLY bad.  Typically when there is that much imbalance, they will break the bead and rotate the tire 90 or 180 and try again.  Racing tires have a dot on them to identify the point which is typically mounted near the valve stem. Here's some more info if you interested...  https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=17

[Fifty150]

So of course, out of curiosity, I crawled under the truck to inspect my other tires.  Being lazy, I only looked under the driver's side.  The girl that installed those used a stick on weights, the same way, placing them along the center line.  On 1 wheel she used 2.75 oz.  On another, she used 1.75 oz.  No crazy pile of weights, placed opposite 180 degrees.  After seeing that 1 side looked okay, I didn't feel like climbing under the passenger's side.  

 

24 lbs for the wheel.  67 lbs for the tire.  91 lbs total.  16 ounces per pound.  1,456 ounces total.  

 

As per tirerack.com :  https://blog.tirerack.com/blog/make-driving-fun-2/how-many-wheel-weights-are-too-many-

While there is no industry standard, the general consensus of what is too much weight is when it takes more than 1% of the assembly weight to bring it into balance.

 

In theory, my wheel should not require more than 14.5 ounces to balance.  In total, the guy used 7 ounces.  Except for the fact that it looks crazy, the math does not seem so bad.  It is only half of the acceptable amount of weight.  I wonder if it made any difference that the tire has seen about 60,000 miles of hard use, and not a brand new tire.

 

Here is what the other two tires, on the driver's side, look like.  Different combination of wheel & tire brands, but similar specs.  !7X9 wheel.  35X12.5R17 tire.  The car has Dick Cepek DC-2 wheels with GreenBall Kanati Mud Hog tires.  The spare is an Pro Comp Series 69, with Hankook DynaPro ATM.

 

 

 

 

[Mike Chell]

Beta Don ... I was going to go into the whole "inside/outside" balancing issue, but I figured it was unnecessary.  It's quite obvious that 2 full ounces of lead are in direct opposition of each other. ... probably the whole 2.75 ounces cancel out which means the balancing only required about an ounce of weight at ONE location.  And since that location appears to be opposite the valve stem, it's probably the correct placement.

 

You typed in your reply while I was typing this, Fifty.  As you can see, I was stating what you found out.

 

[OLDSCHOOLFOOL]

2 hours ago, Fifty150 said:

I've never mounted & balanced a tire in my life.  But any idiot could see that there is something wrong with that picture.   

 

35-12.50s are a pretty good size tire and larger tires can be harder to balance. Along with not having the right tech for the job, they may not have had the right equipment either. I've mounted a few tires (by hand and by god I never want to do another one) but like you I have never balanced one.

[Fifty150]

The math says that it is not too much weight.  But common sense, and perhaps my supervisor, would have made me remove 11 weights on each side..  

 

Again, I don't know $#*t about balancing tires.  My skill level only allows for me to change a tire when needed.  It could very well be that he gave the tire a spin, the machine told him to add weights, gave it another spin, then machine wanted more weight, and 5 spins later..........

[Mike Chell]

I've balanced lots and lots of motorcycle wheels.  I can count on my hands and feet the auto tires I've done.  But the minute you get a reading that says to put weight opposite existing weights, you're doing something wrong.

[G B L]

The wrecked tire was run flat or very low air for several miles and came apart.  If it was mounting a bead leak could be the issue. 

If the tire was balanced on a computer wheel balance machine the computer tells the operator where to place the weights. Then the operator rechecks the balance.  If the tire is out and the Rim is out then spinning the tire on the rim will help.  The fact that the weights are adhesive style and steel requires more weight then the rim mounts .  

Have you had the truck out on the freeway? Take it up to 80, if it is nice and smooth then they have the balance correct.    

 

Edited August 25, 2018 by G B L

[Fifty150]

The freeway around here has an average MPH of 15.

[Beta Don]

17 hours ago, Mike Chell said:

Beta Don ... I was going to go into the whole "inside/outside" balancing issue, but I figured it was unnecessary.  It's quite obvious that 2 full ounces of lead are in direct opposition of each other. ... probably the whole 2.75 ounces cancel out which means the balancing only required about an ounce of weight at ONE location.  And since that location appears to be opposite the valve stem, it's probably the correct placement.

 

My point was, this looks like a case of operator error  -  The wheel is probably statically, but not dynamically balanced, because the operator didn't have a clue what he's doing 

 

On a modern computerized balancer, you input the rim diameter and the rim width  -  Actually, the width of where the inside and outside weights will be placed, which is not always the same as the actual rim width, if you're using tape weights and they are not placed as near the edge of the rim as possible.  Once the machine is set up properly, you only need to spin the wheel one time and it will tell you where to place both the inside and the outside weights

 

It could be that the wheel is actually statically balanced  -  In the old (really old) days, we used a 'bubble balancer' and balanced the wheel by laying weights around the rim until the bubble was centered, however many weights that took  -  Usually, all of them in one place, but untrained operators frequently placed weights all over the place  -   No real problem, so long as you got some combination which centered the bubble.  When the bubble was centered, you had a statically balanced wheel which wouldn't jump around when you drove the car, but it may have still been out of dynamic balance . . . . very likely it was.  This would eventually cause uneven tire wear, which was VERY common in the good old days

 

You could take a wheel/tire put it on a bubble balancer and have it be perfect, with no weights needed.  Put that same wheel/tire on a modern dynamic balancer and find it needs weights to dynamic balance it.  Since it's static balance was already perfect, the odds are almost 100% that the weights needed to bring it into proper dynamic balance will be equal amounts, placed 180 degrees apart with half of them placed on the inside rim and half of them on the outside rim.  This happens more often than you would guess

 

It appears to me looking at the wheel in question, that the technician put a bunch of weights intended for one side of the wheel on the rim and then when the machine told him the amount and placement of the weights for the other side of the rim he put those on the same side too.  Statically that wheel is probably in good balance, so it probably drove OK, but it could have been statically balanced with probably 1/4 of the weights he used, as many of them are just cancelling each other out

 

Don

Edited August 25, 2018 by Beta Don

[Fifty150]

5 hours ago, Beta Don said:

My point was, this looks like a case of operator error  - 

 

 

 

 

I totally agree.  The guy who did that, did not know what he was doing.  And the shop supervisor is even worse, because he allowed that to happen.  

 

Responsibility for good or bad product  is top-down.  The people at the top are not training and supervising the employees properly.  It's like not having a chef to expedite orders and inspect each plate before it goes out.  Not that I know anything about fine dining, or how to run a tire shop.  But I've seen enough FoodTV and Gas Monkey Garage, to know that the technology on CSI is imaginary, and that real life homicides are not solved like they do it on television.  

[WillMartin]

On 8/24/2018 at 8:45 PM, Mike Chell said:

I've balanced lots and lots of motorcycle wheels.  I can count on my hands and feet the auto tires I've done.  But the minute you get a reading that says to put weight opposite existing weights, you're doing something wrong.

Absolutely.  I mounted and balanced tires on the race bike on a regular basis, and never had any issues.  At the kinds of speeds you go while racing, imbalance would show up right away.  As I recall, there were times when no weights were necessary, and most of the time, very few.  Put the weights as close to the centerline of the wheel and life is usually good.  The difference is that motorcycle tires are small and light relative to car or truck tires.  I never want to deal with a car or truck tire myself.  I'm proudly a lazy old man.

[foof]

On 8/24/2018 at 9:35 PM, Fifty150 said:

The math says that it is not too much weight.  But common sense, and perhaps my supervisor, would have made me remove 11 weights on each side..  

 

Again, I don't know $#*t about balancing tires.  My skill level only allows for me to change a tire when needed.  It could very well be that he gave the tire a spin, the machine told him to add weights, gave it another spin, then machine wanted more weight, and 5 spins later..........

 

I used to run a tire shop.  I have balanced probably 10,000 wheels and tires.  Assuming that tire is actually balanced (which you can't tell from a picture) there's nothing wrong with what they did.  There are weights on the inside and outside of the wheel's centerline -- they're all behind the face of the wheel, because with most alloy rims you have to use stick on weights, they're ugly, so the outside ones go inside, but as far outside as possible.  Not being able to put them at the edge means you need a bit more weight, and they could have used heavier stickers (but they probably didn't have them, we always ran out).  If the tire isn't balanced, then they screwed up.   But that's true no matter how many or few weights they used. 

If I liked the customer, and wasn't terribly busy, I might have rotated the tire relative to the rim.  That can change the balance weights required. Probably not for a used tire that was going to be a spare, though. 

[Fifty150]

Thanks for your insight.  An informed opinion, such as yours, is relevant.  I am not a tire tech, have no training or experience.  My opinion has no value.  Just a guy who thinks it's wrong.  Now I won't be as hesitant to drive on it if needed. And again, the math says that all of the weight is within acceptable limits.