Oh Man, tires, too?

The general rule on motorhome tires is they are replaced based on years of life rather than tread wear.  It is very doubtful a normal coach owner, even some one like us that drives quite a few miles in a year, would ever "wear" their tires out.  These are basically truck tires that are designed for many, many miles 100,000 and up.  So the rule of thumb, depending on your aversion to risk is 5-7 years and you should replace your tires no matter how good they look.  A typical motorhome tire sits in one place for long periods of time which is not friendly to the tire.  Most have chemicals that are in the rubber to keep the tire flexible and supple, but they require the movement or driving with the accompanying flexing of the tire to move that chemical around.  When they sit the UV from the sun tends to win out.  Also worth mentioning, each tire has a date stamp on it telling when that particular tire was manufactured. It is a 4 digit number representing the week and the year of manufacture.

My tire here was made the 29th week of 2010

I am pretty careful with our tires.  I make sure the inflation is correct, I inspect them regularly for any problem, make sure I don't curb them, and try to avoid potholes and road hazards as well as I can, but as I was installing our new tire pressure monitoring system I noticed my tires have, what I thought, was a lot of "ozone or weather checking", especially for their age.  

As you can see from the date stamp, I figured we should have another year or so before we needed to replace our tires.  We have 6 tires that were made in the 8th week of 2010, and 2 tires that were made the 29th week of 2010, only about 4 years old.  We had hoped to do our Alaska trip with its approximate 10,000 plus miles and then next spring look into new tires.

This shows the checking pretty well

That made me take a closer look, and I found that all but one tire have a significant, at least to me, amount of checking.  I called Michelin and talked with them about the issue and they said I needed to have the tires inspected to see if it could be a problem.  I called a couple Michelin truck tire dealers in the area and one of them offered to come to us to inspect the tires.  Fantastic!  Well he showed up yesterday, agreed that they shouldn't be checking this much at this age, and we are awaiting his findings and deliberations with Michelin.  In the meantime I decided to look into new tires.

These are pretty big tires, 295/80R22.5, and I might add pretty expensive.  We belong to FMCA, Family Motor Coach Association and one of the perks is their Michelin Tire buying program which offers a significant discount on tires, but only Michelins.  If Michelin does find something wrong with my tires and steps up to the plate we will put Michelins back on.  We had been very pleased up until now.  In the meantime though I looked at Continentals and Bridgestones that according to various forums get good reviews as well.  We don't want to go to a inexpensive Chinese tire.  That's not to start an argument as there are a lot of satisfied customers according to various reports, but for us it is not a player.  We then found out there is a nationwide shortage on our particular tire in our size a XZA2 Energy tire which might be a challenge if we need tires ASAP, but we just learned Michelin has come out with a new motorhome tire that we are looking into, the X Coach HL Z.  This new tire looks promising, it is very similar to our present tire but has more weight capacity at the same pressures, which means we would be able to support our weight with a lower pressure which would mean a softer ride.

So that's where we are right now, waiting to hear if Michelin will kick in some warranty money, can we find new tires and get them put on, all before we are scheduled to leave in about 2 weeks??  Tick, tick, tick.