There is a great deal of art and science needed to successfully recap a tire but recaps can be reliable. Maybe tire pressure monitoring is the answer since heat from operating at reduced pressure is often the cause for recap failure. Occasionally I see a trucker walk around the truck with a metal rod thumping the individual tires to check for low pressure on dual wheels and wonder why that procedure isn’t mandatory.
National Lampoon did a story on trucking many years ago and stated that the reason for whaling on the tires with a club was to kill rubber fleas. They must have been wrong… 
wesw said: "if punctured, the re caps come apart relatively easily, correct? "
No, but clearly well used tires are closer to having a durability failure than brand new ones. But the problem is punctures causing underinflated tires - and those can happen to new or recapped tires
wesw said: "all the debris I see is from re caps… "
No, you don’t. Most of the debris is from recaps because most of the tires are recaps. If only the front tires are the new ones, then 90% of the tires are recaps.
If you ever get the chance, stop and analyze what the debris is - and it pretty much matches the population.
I don’t know. My BIL drove truck and we’d have coffee with other truckers when he was in town. One of the conversations was recaps and it was universal that they would never put recaps on the front tires. It was just too dangerous. I’ve seen shredded tires on the road but a lot of it still seems like its the tread delaminating from from the casing itself. And the treads look like there is quite a bit left yet and not worn.
Educate me, has anyone been in an accident caused by hitting one of these gators? I can see people losing control by overreacting but I have hit many of them and it has never been a problem for me or my vehicle.
A gator flew off and hit my wife and son in the windshield. VERY lucky it didn’t penetrate the windshield or she would have been injured.
Capri, I agree. I was looking at the end result. The huge strips of recap tires that cause us all to make evasive maneuvers to avoid. If it wasn’t for the accidents they cause I wouldn’t care. Somebody in government is not doing there job about this obvious issue.
Many years ago I almost put an elderly man into the ditch from something like this. I was at the wheel of a bobtail on the interstate when one of the outer rear tires let go. The bang caused me to look in the left side mirror just in time to see a cloud of smoke and rubber going everywhere.
This old man was passing me on the inside lane at the time and I saw a large strip of rubber (2-3 feet long) fly up, bounce off of the nose of his Chrysler, and then bang into the windshield.
This startled him naturally and he was all over the roadway before getting it under control. He very nearly went into the deep median between the lanes.
I pulled over and got out expecting the old guy to stop but he just waved as he went by and motored on.
The tire that gave up wasn’t even a recap.
I realize this is a topic change. But, in Mexico, they have some of the best bus service in the world (as well as some of the worst in isolated places, heh, heh.)
Their first class and higher class long haul buses do have tire pressure monitors. You can see them.
xman said: "Capri, I agree. I was looking at the end result. The huge strips of recap tires that cause us all to make evasive maneuvers to avoid. If it wasn’t for the accidents they cause I wouldn’t care. Somebody in government is not doing there job about this obvious issue. "
It’s hard to tell, but if you are agreeing with me, then you must be advocating better and more frequent clean up crews.
Alternatively, since it is truck tires that are causing this, we should ban trucks.
What I am trying to say is that there is no solution to this problem. A ban on recaps doesn’t solve the problem - it only adds cost.
Recaps are legal on the trailer and not on the tractor , They are very cost effective and the carcasses are inspected before capping. Common carrier fleets have many more trailers than tractors and it would be a huge increase in costs to bar recaps from the road. Any truck tire will lose its tread if run flat long enough. The federal DOT eliminated the 100 mile tire check requirement after I retired but in all truth it was mainly ignored by drivers anyway because drivers were paid by the mile and didn’t get paid for stopping to check tires.
There would also be a huge environmental impact from all the additional discarded tires and an increase in passenger tire prices because of increased demand for materials.
Perhaps TPMS are the answer.
“Recaps are legal on the trailer and not on the tractor”
in my neck of the woods, recaps are legal on the tractor . . . but NOT on the steering axle
@rod knox
Occasionally I see a trucker walk around the truck with a metal rod thumping the individual tires to check for low pressure on dual wheels and wonder why that procedure isn't mandatory.
It is mandatory, before the start of every trip, every day. Its just that not everyone does it.
Before we get too carried away worrying about gators, lets worry about impaired drivers, texting drivers ect…
They cause alot more trouble than a gator in the road.
Occasionally I see a trucker walk around the truck with a metal rod thumping the individual tires to check for low pressure on dual wheels and wonder why that procedure isn't mandatory.It is mandatory, before the start of every trip, every day. Its just that not everyone does it.
I thought it was mandatory to actually check the pressure not just thump on the tires. While thumping will tell you if a tire is different than the rest, it won’t tell you what the pressure really is.
Except for a commercial for hire bus it is LEGAL to run a retread/recap on ANY axle of a commercial vehicle. Site:http://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/49/393.75. Anything else you hear about banning recaps is a myth.
Most carriers do not run recaps on the steering axle, but it’s by choice, not regulation. Most of the carriers I see run new tires on the steering axle and then migrate them back to the drive axles or trailer axles when they wear out and are recapped. By regulation, however, a tire can not be used on a steering axle if it has been previously recapped. Only first timers.
Liability wise most carriers just don’t run them. But as I posted earlier, new tire can and will fail mostly from hitting debris or under inflation. Running new tires is no guarantee.
As stated, by regulation a driver must perform a walk around pre-trip and post-trip inspection of the commercial vehicle prior to going in service. This inspection must be documented, usually in the hour of service log book. Some drivers just check the box without doing the walk around. We call those drivers unemployed.
I agree that underinflation or to a lesser degree road debris are the main reasons for truck tire failures. It’s pretty common around here and likely exacerbated by high summer heat and overloading.
It seems that the majority of trucks this happens with are oil field and grain haulers; both a bit notorious for being way heavy while fudging the weight limits and at times driven by some that made you wonder how they ever got a CDL.
Some of those grain haulers go over a 100k pounds and more than a few grain trailers have snapped in half before the tires ever thought of giving up.
One driver was making a turn at a 4-way stop and the trailer broke in two right in the intersection; dumping wheat all over the place and creating a whale of a traffic mess.
Rick, I agree that impaired drivers, texting drivers, and especially drivers whose logs don’t come close to recording their actual hours on the road, are a much more prevalent problem, and a much more dangerous one than road gators. But road gators would be far easier to virtually eliminate. The other problems are already illegal in many (and in the case of the hours, all) states, and yet the battle to eliminate them continues.
Capriracer, a regular for whom I have great respect, made the comment that it’s damaged carcasses that are the problem rather than the recapping itself, but the solution in my mind is simply to eliminate recapping. That would automatically eliminate recapped damaged carcasses too. Big rigs rolling down the highway for 16 hours a day six days a week weighing 30 or 40 tons (or more?) should be as safe as we can reasonably make them. The effects, the risks to other drivers, of a catastrophic tire failure with that much weight are just too great to be making compromises with. I realize most “privates” operate on a slim profit margin, but it would simply have to be added to the shipping costs they charge, as it would to corporate shipping costs, and, amortized, I cannot believe the added cost would be that great that it would have a serious effect on any markets. I think the cost impact is being overrated, while the impact on safety is being underemphasized.
Mountainbike,
I have respect for your expertise, but I think you are working off a fallacy - that the road gators are strictly from recapped tires. They are not. New tires fail just about as often as recapped tires. Eliminating recaps will not solve the problem of road gators.
Worse is that the consumption of truck tires would increase by a factor of 8. That’s a lot of casings to dispose of compared to not eliminating the problem nor improving safety.
Here’s a video on Bandag’s recapping process (apparently owned by Bridgestone now):
From truckinginfo.com:
“Examinations of road debris from dead tires show that most of the gators come from tires that have never been retreaded. Any tire will suffer a similar fate if proper inflation pressure is not maintained.”