Where are the tire guys?

shawn

shawn

running dog lackey of the oppressor class
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Raleigh, NC
I have a set of BFG KO2s with a 7111 date code. All four are the same. My understanding was always that it was numerical week of the year, then last two digits of the year. KO2 didn't come out until 2014, so that makes no sense.

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Not enough numbers there. One side usually just has the dot xxxx zzzz where xxxx = the plant and size and the zzzz = some other code (my bfg book says its a code that goes into more detail about the size and spec of the tire.)

The other side of the tires dot code will usually read dot xxxx zzzz wwyy with ww being weeks and yy being year.

Long story short, one side doesn't always have the date the other side does. Check both sides. Lots of tires will have the full dot code on the "ugly" or inside sidewall.

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shawn said:
I'll check, but @trailhugger is going to take exception to you calling the OWL side the "ugly" side. :flipoff2:
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Key word was "Lots" not "All" [emoji23]

Sent from my HTC6545LVW using Tapatalk
 
Well, there aren't 71 weeks in any year, so you're looking at the wrong number.
 
grapehead said:
Well, there aren't 71 weeks in any year, so you're looking at the wrong number.
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That's what I'm saying. But I have another set of KO2s that have the correct number in the same spot on the tire.

I'm going to check the other side and see what I can turn up.
 
What about leap years?
 
@rockcity I thought you said these didn't last on 3/4 ton trucks? @trailhugger's new truck came with a set. Best I can figure, they have about 25-30k on them, still half tread. She got a 6.0L, poor thing only makes 300-some HP, but it hasn't killed them yet. The fronts are a little feathered, but I think that's just because they've never been rotated.
 
IIRC, he was rocking them on a 6.7 Powerstroke CCLB F350. It's probably rougher on tires than a Suburban....

My buddy also got crappy results on his 02 Dodge diesel. Maybe it has something to do with the amount of torque?
 
SFA is also harder on tires than IFS...
 
Or, how people drive and do service. One fellas mash it to another's milk it makes all the difference.

I rate tires just like brakes and ball joints. Everybody complains about Dodge front ends and such. Last time I checked driving like doin time trials kills anything not designed as such. And wheels....whole other mess of what did you expect.

I never knew the inside vs. the outter could be coded different.
Some tires are junk and others intended to hook up, I'd hate to be the guy listing the warranty period.

So how do they get a baseline? Durameter and design with computer models? I know a few folks who throw normal out the window leaving the tire store.
 
@Ron The Dodge is 2wd. I think he got 22,000 miles out of them. They wore evenly and round, but just too fast. It's a bone stock, automatic, VP44 truck...so basically no power.
 
shawn said:
@rockcity I thought you said these didn't last on 3/4 ton trucks? @trailhugger's new truck came with a set. Best I can figure, they have about 25-30k on them, still half tread. She got a 6.0L, poor thing only makes 300-some HP, but it hasn't killed them yet. The fronts are a little feathered, but I think that's just because they've never been rotated.
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Fawk those pieces of shit.


If a truck came with them, ok I’d run them. But I won’t spend another $ on them for a tow rig. BFG knows. They won’t even offer a tread life warranty on them where better performing and cheaper options will.

So, fawk them. I’m running Nittos now and like them so far.
 
Yeah BFGs in any flavor aren’t really meant for trucks over 7000 lbs. I had about 20k on my factory BFGs on my last F250 before I put some Toyos on there. Put another 20k on those and they were at half tread > far better tires (@ 80psi and towing a lot of the time).
 
shawn said:
@rockcity I thought you said these didn't last on 3/4 ton trucks? @trailhugger's new truck came with a set. Best I can figure, they have about 25-30k on them, still half tread. She got a 6.0L, poor thing only makes 300-some HP, but it hasn't killed them yet. The fronts are a little feathered, but I think that's just because they've never been rotated.
Click to expand...

I just yesterday replaced a set that I got 53k out of on the 2500 with at least 20-25k of that towing an 11000lb trailer. The fronts still had about quarter tread, the rears were just about bald in the middle. They actually only started getting noisey and wearing bad after I rotated them this spring.
 
WARRIORWELDING said:
So how do they get a baseline? Durameter and design with computer models?
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Partially. Rubber compound durometer is a small part of it, but there are all of the other ingredients in the rubber as well that affect durability for any given rubber durometer. You could loosely assume that a harder durometer would last longer, but the durometer doesn't really tell you about durability of the rubber by itself. Kind of like how the hardness of steel doesn't really tell you much about fatigue or wear, but the alloy of the steel does.

Modeling a tire is extremely difficult to do properly, as it's a really non-linear system with the thermal dependencies of the rubber and the interactions between the rubber and all the carcass materials and construction, and then throw in all the changes that the tire goes through as it ages and wears, and changes in load, pressure, etc. A lot of the testing is done on flat track tire test rigs (a very expensive, articulated belt sander), and validated on actual vehicles, and then extrapolated across the range of sizes for a particular tire family. That's one of the reasons that different sizes in a tire family don't always have the same response, or wear, etc. You've got slightly tweaked carcass construction because of a different width, or sidewall aspect, etc., and different load distribution at the contact patch from different sizes, so tire wear for the same rubber compound can change just by changing some aspect of the tire size for a particular load. BFG is not doing full durability validation testing for every individual size of KO2 offered is really what I'm trying to say.

All of that is just scratching the surface for physical interactions.

Rubber compounding is a bit of a black art (pun intended).
 
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