Feathered Tires

["Rudy Consolacion" <rconsolacion@kumhotech.com>]

I lost a post from someone asking about their tires feathering in the 
shoulder area of the tire. So, here's my response to the list.

If I understand the problem correctly, the tires are feathering on 
the outside ribs only.  This is generally called heel-toe wear.  If 
you look at the tread block, the heel of the block is the edge that 
contacts the road surface first (also called leading edge) followed 
by the toe (also called trailing edge). Heel-toe wear is aggravated 
by excessive slip angle which means aggressive driving in corners.  
There are cases where the tread pattern is not properly designed to 
even handle straight-ahead rolling.  What happens is as the tread 
block begins to roll out of the footprint, the toe also gets pulled 
out of the footprint.  This creates excessive wear at that edge of 
the tread block.  This is can be cured by designing a better 
footprint shape and pressure distribution.  So, what I am saying is 
that it could be a design problem.

If you drive aggressively all of the time, you may need to rotate 
your tires more often.  I generally find myself rotating around every 
2500 miles.  If you have directional tires, I guess you're out of 
luck because the goal is to change the rolling direction of the tire 
to reverse the heel-toe wear.

Rudy C.