ROTATION

[Bill Reeves]

My '01 ST owner's manual says to criss-cross rear to front and bring front to back. Discount Tires just moves back to front/front to back. Anybody know which is better?

 

[Todd Z]

How are your tires ?? were the cupped at all ??



Do you drive hard, burnouts, corner hard ??



I always just do Front to back....



They criss cross them to evenly wear the fronts and prevent cupping noise and feathering...



Todd Z

 

[Tom Schindler]

I always criss cross mine.





Tom

 

[Clay Campbell]

there is a diagram at my tire place. it makes a difference if the car is rear wheel or front wheel drive. and maybe 4x4, not sure about the 4x4 part. there is definitely a right way to do

 

[Johnny O]

Rear Wheel Drive -- cross rears to front and bring fronts straight back.

Front Wheel Drive -- cross fronts to rear and bring rears straight front.



Discount Tire likely does a straight front to rear swap so they can do every car the same way and some industrial engineer probably figured it would save two minutes per car.

 

[Dingo]

Bill, do you have directional tires?

 

[Kevin Palmer]

With the older bias ply tires crossing them was detrimental to tire life...



However, with the radial tires you have on your Trac, the most common method is to cross the rears, bring them forward, bring the front stright back. This will put the tire at every location and allow for the longest tire life as long as you have no issue that is destroying a tire at a certain location...

 

[Gavin Allan]

I do mine like Coastie says.

 

[EddieS'04]

I have always move rear straight forward and crossed fronts to rear. Never in 20 some odd years had a problem.

 

[Kevin Palmer]

Eddie, same end result no matter which you switch from side to side...



The reason most do it the other way is so that all the tires get equal time at each location.



For example, you go to Goodyear and they do it as I explained above, then if you went to Joe Mechanic and he did it your way... The issue there would be that all 4 tires would be right back to where they were before Goodyear did the rotation...



Here is my best example.



C,D

A,B (before any rotaion)



B,A

C,D (After Goodyear roation)



A,B

C,D (if the front get swap around as opposed to the back after Goodyear did it the other way)...



Thus, no real change.

 

[EddieS'04]

CJ, I see your point. If I dont do it myself. I always make the tire shop put it on the work order my way. Then I make sure the guy see's it.



edit; what got me to taking the rear straight forward is I have had less problems with tire pull until the belts seltled (kept the rotation on the front tires the same)

Just my experiance..

 

[Eric Pennal]

do you have directional tires?

Dingo hits the nail on the head. You can't swap directional tires left to right. The tread will separate.

 

[Dingo]

Or, with mine, if you drive through water, the tires will pull the water in to the center of the tread.

 

[Bill Reeves]

Thanks, y'all, next time I'll have them cross rears to front and bring fronts back. I appreciate the comments.