Tyre info......

[SGHOM]

some useful/useless tyre info for you. :speechles

you may already know, but if not...here goes;

on the outer rim of the tyre...nearest to the rim/wheel, you can see a "DOT" figure/number. after that there may be 2 or 4 letters... ignore them.
after that, there is a date of manufacture of the tyre !! [ I never knew that?? ]
It may say 2204.... which means it was manufactured in the 22nd week of 2004. Almost all tyres have this. :afro:

It's always marked in weeks & year...... & .... apparently.. tyres over 5 yrs old should not be used. :inquisiti
I'm not saying our galants will have old tyres on, but some of us have 'spare' cars. :thinking:

[Spirit]

Interesting fact, will check mine out.....cheers D :pimp2:

[WildCards]

Yeah, I bet some of the tyres i've got for the Pug are past their use by date in that case.

[TAR]

More useful/useless tyre info:

Red, yellow dots and coloured bands on treads.

The dots on the sidewall denote unformity and weight. All tyres have a point on the tread which is lighter than the rest of the tyre. When the tyre is manufactured, this point is found and a coloured dot is put on the sidewall corresponding to the light spot. Typically this is a yellow dot and is known as the weight mark. The yellow dot should end up aligned to the valve stem on your wheel. This is because you can help minimize the amount of weight needed to balance the tyre and wheel by mounting so that its light point is matched up with the wheel's heavy balance point. Every wheel has a valve stem which cannot be moved so that is considered to be the heavy balance point for the wheel.

Its also nearly impossible to make a tyre which is perfectly circular. Every tyre has a high and a low spot, the difference of which is called radial runout. Manufacturers typically mark this point with a red dot on the tyre sidewall, this is called the uniformity mark.
Correspondingly, most wheel rims are also not 100% circular, and will have a notch or a dimple stamped into the wheel rim somewhere indicating their low point.
The high point of the tyre should be matched with the low point of the wheel rim to balance out the radial runout.

If you get a tyre with both a red and a yellow dot on it, it should be mounted according to the red dot and the dimple on the wheel rim, and the yellow mark should be ignored.

Coloured bands denote something called runout. Depending on how the belts are laid on the tyre during manufacturing, they can cause the tire to "run out" - to not track perfectly straight, but pull to the left or right. The closer to the centre of the tyre that these lines are, the less runout the tyre has and the straighter it will track when mounted on your car. So for example, if you were looking at your car from the front and you saw the coloured striped running around the right side of both your front tyres, the car would likely have a tendency to pull to that side. The best thing is to have the coloured stripes on opposite sides of the tyres for opposite sides of the car, so that the runout on each side will counteract the other and help maintain a good straight running.

[bradc]

carbibles.com :)