The key is to have the proper tools to mount and balance a set of tires. Most people don't nor do they care to wrestle 4 tires onto rims using makeshift spoons...and they're still left with balancing and disposing of the old tires.
Personally, I just have my friendly neighborhood Ford dealer do the whole job.
I've bought a couple of sets from these people but it's been a couple of years now. Free shipping, no sales tax or environmental fees. No faster or further than I go now days I don't know if I'll ever need to buy another tire. I did fix a leak in one the other day. I rather enjoy changing and patching and balancing my own tires. Reminds me of my first job at a service station over 50 years ago.
You need the following, which costs around $300 overall
While it's true that most people don't want to mount and balance a tire, they do spend far more than the tools cost to have someone else "wrestle 4 tires onto rims".
At 20 bucks a tire for mounting and balancing, and at 300 bucks for a complete set of tools, that's about three years elapsed time for the tools to pay for themselves in cost (assuming a two car family who changes tires on each car every two years).
The tools pay for themselves in convenience the very first day, since you can patchplug a repairable puncture in your own garage, which is mighty convenient (ask me how I know).
Disposing of tires is trivial. You drive them to Costco, pay the buck per tire, and they're gone. Or you drive them to any tire shop, pay whatever their price is, and they're gone.
Balancing is mostly feared by people who have never once balanced their own wheels. Balancing, to them, is 99% fear and 1% logic.
What's the absolute worst thing that's gonna happen if your tires are imbalanced when brand new?
The people who are afraid of balancing, and those who swear that *every* wheel needs to be "road force balanced" are the same people who have never balanced a tire in their lives.
In other words, they don't know what they're talking about, where they can only fear the unknown.
There's nothing wrong with being fearful, but guess what happens to those tires six months, ten months, twelve months, two years into the driving cycle?
Are they still balanced? If not - what happened to all that unbalanced fear?
While there's nothing wrong with being overly scared of tires, you seem to be unduly scared, if the fact you go to a dealer for such things is any indication of your state of mind.
Most people wouldn't go to the car dealer for mounting and balancing tires, so you're probably highly unusual, in that the only reason most people go to the dealer is to get parts that can't be gotten elsewhere without ordering.
Of course, if money is no object, and if fear is the main object, then the dealer is the "safest" place to go. I understand that tires scare a lot of people.
But the next time you have someone else mount your tires, consider that the guy who just got arrested for setting the fire that collapsed that Atlanta interstate bridge is quoted in the Washington Post today as having stopped off under the bridge with his two other buddies to smoke crack before he went into to work at a tire shop.
"Eleby told investigators he regularly passes through the area on the way to his job at a nearby tire shop".
I'm with you in that it's satisfying to patch a tire in the driveway knowing that you did a good job, without having to even pull out the spare.
What kind of percentage have you gotten on balancing? I'm running close to
100% of the tires I've mounted as causing zero palpable vibration at speed.It seems that the only ones afraid of imbalanced tires are those who have never balanced one in their lives, so they are operating 99% on fear alone.
What's the worst thing that can happen if the tires you just mounted are imbalanced when you test it out on the highway?
And what do those balance fearful people do a year or two into the life of the tires?
This Goodyear shill says to balance three to four times a year!
This says to balance twice a year (for a fifteen-thousand mile year):
This also says to balance twice a year:
Here they again say to balance every six months:
This says to balance every year:
Yet CarTalk Tom & Ray say you never need to rebalance mounted tires:
Very few of us mount our own tires. I can't justify the investment when I buy a set of tires every18 months at best.
Let's call it "good value". I don't mind paying a little more at times but I certainly don't want to get gouged. I try to check out prices before buying anything. Lowest price is not always the cheapest buy.
Ask the guy that has a flat spare because he never check it.
You'd be right if I was driving my '62 Corvair with 13" wheels. I need
245/45R18 and cheap ones ar $92 and go up to $260. I drive enough to justify a good tire over one that just has to go 2 miles to the grocery store.Questionable. I want a good tire when I hit 100 mph so I;m willing to pay for it.
What is pure profit? Are you talking the difference between the price they pay and the price they sell the tire? That is far from pure. OTOH, if you did a cost analysis of the labor and overhead of running the business I may agree.
On 4/1/2017 5:49 PM, Jonas Schneider wrote: (snip) I use one of the bubble balancers from Harbor Freight or maybe it was e-bay or Amazon. I don't bother re-balancing them unless there is a noticeable vibration. It's plenty good enough no faster than I drive now days. There are several ways to static balance a wheel and tires. I usually split the weights on each side and maybe 6 inches apart on each side of the rim if it needs much weight. The tires I have balanced, I guess if they aren't out of round or twisted belts they all balanced good enough. Sure, a super duper computer balancer with dynamic and road force balancing is great, it all amounts to how much a person wants to spend to go a mile down the road.
I think most of us don't do "hard" things, where we define "hard" any way we want.
For example, probably none of us roof our own homes. Probably none of us pump our own septic systems. Many of us don't even maintain our own pool chemistry.
In the realm of automobile maintenance, most of us don't replace clutches, nor do most of us blueprint an engine. Probably we do basic repairs, but I agree with you that most people consider both mounting tires and aligning the steering and suspension to be jobs we routinely farm out.
Having said that we farm out the "hard" jobs, you'll note that I think your statement is completely incorrect that we can't "justify the investment".
Mounting and balancing tools are about three hundred bucks, where it's trivial to justify that investment based on your cycle of 18 months per vehicle for a set of tires.
At 20 per tire the equipment pays for itself in 15 tires, which for two cars would be about six years (at 18 months per set) if I did the math right.
Likewise, alignment equipment is similarly priced at about three to five hundred bucks, which at a price of alignments at about a hundred bucks out here (on sale), would pay for itself in just a few years for a two-car family.
Everyone "says" they can't justify the price - but the real reason we don't do alignment is that there is a tremendous amount of thinking that has to do on in order to convert length to angles and vice versa.
Similarly, the reason people don't do their own mounting and balancing is not the justification of the price - but it's the hard work involved - and also a bit of learning about technique.
There are no blanket absolutes, where I agree with you that most people zoom into price and price alone as the arbiter of quality.
The main problem I see with humans is that they're basically incapable of handling the detail that is required to get the best price-to-performance value of complex objects.
For example, how many times have you seen someone shop for car batteries by warrantee length, for example? That's ridiculous. Yet people do it. You know why? They can't handle the complexity of amps and amp hours.
Likewise with tires. They buy them by treadwear warrantee claims, as if that was in the least meaningful. You know why? Because people who can't handle detail can still handle numbers. To them, a tire with a 45K mile warrantee is better than a tire with a 35K mile warrantee - simply because they can process the fact that 45K is a larger number than 35K is.
My theory is that the reason why people think that price is an indication of quality is only because they don't know how to determine quality - but - they can figure out price. So, to make their simple minds process the problem set, they immediately assume a $500 tire is better than a $100 tire.
I've seen people who get flats park their car on the shoulder, and call for a ride (or call for AAA). Mostly women, where, I agree, some SUV tires are extremely heavy, and it's not worth getting run over at night in the rain while you're changing a spare tire.
But most of us can change our own tires.
Besides, most of us carry a 12-VDC compressor in the trunk along with the OEM jack, triangle reflectors, chocks, spare tools, a flashlight, etc.
How do you define a "good tire"?
Your argument above seems to assume a $92 tire is worse than a $260 tire. But your argument didn't say a single thing about what you use to determine what a "good tire" is.
Price has absolutely no bearing on quality. Price is only an indication of demand.
There are a *lot* of not-so-intelligent people out there who will pay upwards of tens of thousands of dollars for a diamond-studded watch, but that doesn't mean you get any better of a time piece than a ten-dollar Timex.
AFAIK, no standard passenger car tire is legal to sell in the USA that won't go 112 mph. The "S" rating is the slowest tire that is allowed to be sold in the USA for standard-use passenger on-road tires.
That means you won't be able to find a tire for your car that can't go 100 mph, especially at that size.
Nonetheless, how would you compare these tires at Walmart today?
$73 Milestar MS932 Sport Radial Tire, 245/45R18 100V
$80 245/45ZR18 100W BSW Radar Dimax R8 Tires
$81 Rydanz ROADSTER R02 Tire P245/45R18 100W
$105 Nexen N5000 Plus Tire 245/45R18XL 100V
$114 Antares Ingens A1 245/45R18 100W Tire
$115 General GMAX AS-03 Tire 245/45ZR18XL 100W
$120 Uniroyal Tiger Paw GTZ All Season Tire 245/45ZR18 96W
$126 Kumho ECSTA 4XII Tire 245/45R18 100W
$141 General Altimax RT43 Tire 245/45R18 100V Tire
$151 245/45-18 HANKOOK VENTUS S1 Noble 2 H452 100W BSW Tires
$151 Goodyear Eagle RS-A Tire P245/45R18
$154 BF Goodrich g-Force COMP 2 A/S Tire 245/45ZR18 96W
$157 Cooper CS5 Ultra Touring 100V Tire 245/45R18
$157 Yokohama Advan Sport A/S 100W Tire 245/45R18
$171 Continental Extreme Contact DWS06 Tire 245/45ZR18XL 100Y
$175 Pirelli PZero All Season Plus 245/45R18XL 100Y
$216 Michelin Pilot MXM4 Tire P245/45R18 96V
$232 Vogue Custom Built Radial VIII 245/45R18 100 V Tires
HINT: I know how to pick the best tire in that bunch - and it's not by price alone.
Your question is a fair question, since my original assumption was that tires are a commodity, where it's not the general nature of a commodity to sell much above it's cost.
Let's go back to that number to see what it was saying exactly.
That PDF says that there are 200 million replacement tires sold each year, where, on page 52 of that document, we find the exact words: "According to a recent Modern Tire Dealer survey of independent retail and wholesale tire dealers, the average profit margin on a passenger tire is 26.4%. For a light truck tire it falls to 24%. The average wholesale passenger tire sales margin is 12.4%."
I think most of us don't do "hard" things, where we define "hard" any way we want.
For example, probably none of us roof our own homes. Probably none of us pump our own septic systems. Many of us don't even maintain our own pool chemistry.
In the realm of automobile maintenance, most of us don't replace clutches, nor do most of us blueprint an engine. Probably we do basic repairs, but I agree with you that most people consider both mounting tires and aligning the steering and suspension to be jobs we routinely farm out.
Having said that we farm out the "hard" jobs, you'll note that I think your statement is completely incorrect that we can't "justify the investment".
Mounting and balancing tools are about three hundred bucks, where it's trivial to justify that investment based on your cycle of 18 months per vehicle for a set of tires.
At 20 per tire the equipment pays for itself in 15 tires, which for two cars would be about six years (at 18 months per set) if I did the math right.
Likewise, alignment equipment is similarly priced at about three to five hundred bucks, which at a price of alignments at about a hundred bucks out here (on sale), would pay for itself in just a few years for a two-car family.
Everyone "says" they can't justify the price - but the real reason we don't do alignment is that there is a tremendous amount of thinking that has to do on in order to convert length to angles and vice versa.
Similarly, the reason people don't do their own mounting and balancing is not the justification of the price - but it's the hard work involved - and also a bit of learning about technique.
There are no blanket absolutes, where I agree with you that most people zoom into price and price alone as the arbiter of quality.
The main problem I see with humans is that they're basically incapable of handling the detail that is required to get the best price-to-performance value of complex objects.
For example, how many times have you seen someone shop for car batteries by warrantee length, for example? That's ridiculous. Yet people do it. You know why? They can't handle the complexity of amps and amp hours.
Likewise with tires. They buy them by treadwear warrantee claims, as if that was in the least meaningful. You know why? Because people who can't handle detail can still handle numbers. To them, a tire with a 45K mile warrantee is better than a tire with a 35K mile warrantee - simply because they can process the fact that 45K is a larger number than 35K is.
My theory is that the reason why people think that price is an indication of quality is only because they don't know how to determine quality - but - they can figure out price. So, to make their simple minds process the problem set, they immediately assume a $500 tire is better than a $100 tire.
I've seen people who get flats park their car on the shoulder, and call for a ride (or call for AAA). Mostly women, where, I agree, some SUV tires are extremely heavy, and it's not worth getting run over at night in the rain while you're changing a spare tire.
But most of us can change our own tires.
Besides, most of us carry a 12-VDC compressor in the trunk along with the OEM jack, triangle reflectors, chocks, spare tools, a flashlight, etc.
How do you define a "good tire"?
Your argument above seems to assume a $92 tire is worse than a $260 tire. But your argument didn't say a single thing about what you use to determine what a "good tire" is.
Price has absolutely no bearing on quality. Price is only an indication of demand.
There are a *lot* of not-so-intelligent people out there who will pay upwards of tens of thousands of dollars for a diamond-studded watch, but that doesn't mean you get any better of a time piece than a ten-dollar Timex.
AFAIK, no standard passenger car tire is legal to sell in the USA that won't go 112 mph. The "S" rating is the slowest tire that is allowed to be sold in the USA for standard-use passenger on-road tires.
That means you won't be able to find a tire for your car that can't go 100 mph, especially at that size.
Nonetheless, how would you compare these tires at Walmart today?
$73 Milestar MS932 Sport Radial Tire, 245/45R18 100V
$80 245/45ZR18 100W BSW Radar Dimax R8 Tires
$81 Rydanz ROADSTER R02 Tire P245/45R18 100W
$105 Nexen N5000 Plus Tire 245/45R18XL 100V
$114 Antares Ingens A1 245/45R18 100W Tire
$115 General GMAX AS-03 Tire 245/45ZR18XL 100W
$120 Uniroyal Tiger Paw GTZ All Season Tire 245/45ZR18 96W
$126 Kumho ECSTA 4XII Tire 245/45R18 100W
$141 General Altimax RT43 Tire 245/45R18 100V Tire
$151 245/45-18 HANKOOK VENTUS S1 Noble 2 H452 100W BSW Tires
$151 Goodyear Eagle RS-A Tire P245/45R18
$154 BF Goodrich g-Force COMP 2 A/S Tire 245/45ZR18 96W
$157 Cooper CS5 Ultra Touring 100V Tire 245/45R18
$157 Yokohama Advan Sport A/S 100W Tire 245/45R18
$171 Continental Extreme Contact DWS06 Tire 245/45ZR18XL 100Y
$175 Pirelli PZero All Season Plus 245/45R18XL 100Y
$216 Michelin Pilot MXM4 Tire P245/45R18 96V
$232 Vogue Custom Built Radial VIII 245/45R18 100 V Tires
HINT: I know how to pick the best tire in that bunch - and it's not by price alone.
I use the same bubble balancer.
Even so, I often skip the bubble balancing step, because if the wheels don't vibrate at speed, they're balanced.
If they vibrate, I can still balance them. And if they still vibrate, I can get them balanced.
So, there's no harm done by just skipping the balancing step altogether, at least until they're driven at speed.
While many of us would "say" we don't balance because the price of the equipment doesn't pay for itself, you hit upon the real reason most of us don't balance our own wheels.
It takes energy and thought and thinking to do it right.
If you have vibration at speed, it can be a lot of things - but if you don't have vibration at speed, then, AFAIK, the wheels are balanced.
I think that super-duper computer stuff is great for a company that sells
80 tires a day (which is the average according to the PDF I quoted already).For a six-day work week, that's 25K tires a year for the average tire dealer.
All that super-duper computer stuff is for that kind of guy, who does twenty-five thousand tires a year. With that many tires, he'd go broke if just 1% of his customers had to bring back their wheels for remounting due to vibration.
But a homeowner, who changes tires once every two years per vehicle, for an average of once every year overall, that kind of equipment is overkill.
The huge mistake people make is in assuming that you can't balance a tire without expensive equipment, just as they assume you can't align your undamaged car to the specs using just a couple hundred dollars worth of digital measurement tools and plates.
It's my theory, having done both alignment and mounting/balancing, that most people "say" they can't justify the costs - but - the real reason they don't do it themselves is that it takes a lot of thinking and effort and technique - and even then - it's a lot of effort.
It's easier to just pay someone else to do it, just like you pay someone else to pump out your septic system.
There is nothing wrong with farming out jobs. What's wrong, IMHO, is when people aren't honest with themselves as to why they don't do alignment or mounting/balancing tires.
They don't do it because it takes thinking and effort. Not because of the equipment costs.
Here are the definitions: Sales Margin:
That is a pretty small margin, Far from pure profit. You have to take out rent, labor, utilities, insurance, supplies for office, shipping, maintenance,taxes.
So enlighten us.
Best what?
Tread wear?
Dry traction?
Wet braking?
Ice?
Snow?
Noise?
Cornering?
Ride?
There is no best.
Watch out for speed rating. If you car OEM calls for a speed rated tire, they may try to force you to that more expensive choice. Looks like even the online guys do that if you search by vehicle le type.
There was a time I did all of that stuff. As I got older, I found it easier to write checks than drop a tranny. I still put in the windshield washer fluid though.
On a monetary basis, yes. On a practical basis, no. I'm not willing to invest a lot of time and space to save $20 when I can earn that in less time than it takes to mount the tire.
Work is a factor. Some people actually enjoy the sense of accomplishment more than the money saved. Or perhaps you can do a little part time brain surgery and earn enough in an hour to pay for a full set of tires, including mount and balance.
Given the price difference it may be better, but not 5X better. I find that as price goes up, value goes down. Applies to most everything we buy. Double the price and get 50% better, tops. Is it better to have a fully loaded Chevy or a stripped down Buick at the same price?
My car came with 5 ears of roadside assistance. Last time a tire had to be changed I sat in the car at night in the rain for 20 minutes for the guy to show up. Nice feature. I don't recall the last time I used a lug wrench, but is is over 25 years.
You have quite a list of tires. Some do not give a traction rating though. Of course, I'd want A or AA. What the specs don't show is how well constructed the tire is, how well it rides, how quiet it is. Name brand means little too. There are plenty of lesser known companies that make excellent products.
I a curious as to which one you would buy and why.
You have my attention
Your point is valid which is that a speed rating (e.g., W or V or Z) can be used as a marketing tool, and which may not necessarily have anything to do with tire safety.
The speed rating isn't about speed anyway - it's about temperature - which is really about dissipation - which is a function of heat generation at speed - all of which is determined by vehicle size, weight, road friction, and, of course, speed.
Therefore, IMHO, anyone who takes the speed rating literally, is a fool. It's all about how you use the tires and how they're constructed.
In effect, there is no such thing as a "speed rating" since the speed rating that a passenger tire receives is really a "heat rating" or more correctly, a measure of the heat-generation-and-dissipation rating, where the generation of heat is greater at speed due to the double flexing of the sidewall happening faster and faster as speed increases.
If you're comparing two tires for construction, you first look at the load range before you even bother to look at the speed rating or temperature rating. Any tire that is below the load range of the OEM tire is not a tie you should consider (and which nobody reputable will sell to you anyway).
Along with the load range, you can look at the "ply rating", which is in terms of standard load (SL), light load (LL), extra load (XL), etc. which gives you a further indication of construction.
After the load and ply ratings, you have the temperature rating (which is related to speed as described above) and the speed rating itself (which is really a heat-generation-and-dissipation rating).
All these specs intertwine to prove a pretty good indication of the construction of the tire.
You seem to have completely missed the entire point of selecting tires by what you care about, but, without taking a wild-assed guess.
For example, if what you care about in tires is impressing the bleached blondes that you saw advertised on the Michelin or Cooper commercials, you're not gonna be able to reliably select the right tires for you - since the data you seek doesn't exist reliably.
So, for example, you mentioned "Ice" and "Snow" and "Noise" and "Cornering" and "Ride", and then you said, "There is no best".
Since you used those criteria, you have to ask yourself the truth. Where are you going to get that data? And is that data reliable?
In the same breath, you mentioned, "Tread wear", "Dry traction", and "Wet braking", where at least you have somewhat reliable specs printed on the sidewall which directly correlate and which are tested by multiple entities.
The main argument of my premise is that people often select tires on criteria which are valid for them, but which they have almost zero reliable data (if not zero).
You will never have reliable data, for example, on the "ice" handling characteristics of any standard passenger tire (we're not talking about studded tires here, for example).
You're just not gonna get that information. You're just not.
So, if you care about ice handling on your passenger tire, you might seek out reviews where a boy racer swears this one tire handles ice better than any other tire he has ever driven upon, but that's just not gonna be a reliable predictor of the ice-handling capability of your P-metric tires.
Since you say "there is no best", you've actually said you agree with me, in that a large part of my premise is that you throw out any tires that fail OEM specs.
Once you have tires that meet OEM specs, you can select among the rest based on criteria you feel are most important.
If wet traction is most important to you, then you select only from the AA tires, for example. But if both wet traction and average dry traction is important to you, then you select among AA and 400-or-lower tires, for example.
If cornering traction is most important to you, you're out of luck for direct numbers, but you can "infer" some cornering traction from the dry traction, speed rating, temperature rating, and load-handling specs, all of which can only indirectly confer cornering characteristics.
In summary, choosing tires by the numbers is easy, as long as you understand what numbers are reliable, what each of the numbers means, and if you know what you care about most,. where you will always be making tradeoffs but where all the tires you're selecting from are at or better than the OEM specs.
As I explained to Ed Pawlowski, my process may differ from yours or his, so, I only present my process as a logical process based on an understanding of the specs and the various tradeoffs, where you can't go wrong in my process because you throw out all tires that don't meet OEM specs (if you believe in the OEM specs, which I do for my tires).
Once you've whittled down the selection to tires that all meet or exceed the OEM specs, then you rank them in the order of trusted specification that you care about most.
If you care most about "road noise", then you're a gonner because you're not going to get that as a reliable spec, even if you read all the boy-racer reviews on the planet.
Likewise, if you care about marketing appeal (e.g., whatever marketing claims you'll get, whether that be blonds smiling at you while you drive by or the safety of not running over the neighbor's kids), you're not gonna be able to reliably rank the tires.
However, if you care about, say, wet traction, well then, you're in luck. The specs on the side of the tire tell you the wet straight-line traction coefficient on both asphalt and concrete.
Also the treadwear gives you the average dry traction coefficient in the ratio of 2.25 divided by the treadwear raised to the 0.15 power.
So that gives you three separate traction coefficients to rank the tiers by first.
Let's say you second-most care about safety, given that all tires sold in the USA are safe. Some are better built than others, where there are a bunch of ratings which give you construction information.
There's the speed rating from the manufacturer (e.g., W versus V), which is really a heat-generation-and-dissipating rating, and there's the temperature rating (e.g., A vs B) which is similar but measured by the government. There's also the load range (e.g., 99 versus 95), and the ply rating (e.g., XL).
And then there's the price which can offset any of those based on your current feeling about dollars.
If money is no object, then you can get the AA A A 100 XL 105W tires, but if money is critical to you, then you still can't go wrong with AA A A 500
99V rated tires.Once you list the tires by spec that you care about, there is almost never a dead-heat tied, but if there were a tie, I'd use the "soft stuff" as the tie breaker, e.g., white sidewalls, or treadwear warranty, or the smile of the salesman or the taste of their free coffee.
It's the same method as you choose brake pads by the way, or motor oil, or differential lube, or any commodity that has technical merit.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.