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Southern Alberta Canada | This is beginning to sound like a court case. The problem with many of these statements and laws is they are based on statistics and investigations of incidents. They don't know the actual facts leading to these failures and what actually happens if there is a failure. All they have is evidence of what happened after the fact. Reading some of the statements made by people that don't run or work with trucks is somewhat misleading. They seem to assume your going to keep driving a truck after the failure of a single tire in a dual setup. There is an extremely low chance of tires catching fire or of rollover when a single tire fails in a dual situation and way lower in a tandem or tridem. If it's gone this far it has progressed to a situation where the driver is not paying attention and shouldn't be operating equipment. I've seen and heard of several situations of steering tire failure causing wrecks (happened to my father three times, I was with him once, those were back in the days we were running bias tires). Non that I've seen were recaps...
I'm sure the failure rate of capped tires is probably up to ten times that of virgin tires but that failure rate is still extremely low and the indecent rate is even lower because responsible owners and operators catch and correct the issues before their units enter the highway. I never run caps on steering axles but I'm not afraid to run them on drive and trailer axles, I've had allot better luck with recaps on drive axles but personally haven't had a trailer tire come apart, just go flat and have caught a few separating.
The laws are there to protect us. The biggest problem with the laws is why do they have to make them so complicated? Most tire shop employees and people that work with tires are entry level workers with low experience, management has enough to deal with without making sure a recapped tire meets all the criteria to be used on a steering axle. Personally I would not allow recaps on steering axles period. I believe there is no way to monitor remaining life in a casing regardless of it being capped once or ten times. At 200,000km I would believe the metal will have reached almost the end of it's fatigue life. At least with new tires you have the benefit of new materials throughout. Plus steering tires are such a small market compared other positions that recaps don't need to be in there anyway.
Another thing that seems to be missed is the price difference. When I was using recaps I would only use the Bandag Eclipse cap, these actually wrap around the casing about an inch down the sidewalls, it's difficult to see the tire was capped. Problem was for trailers these tires were only $25 less than new shallow tread trailer tires but for drive axles they were over a hundred. | |
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for those who say recap tires are the way to go....Pic!
