- JBFUK
- Member Since: 25 Apr 2022
- Location: South East
- Posts: 46
Balancing tyre wear
Hi all,
Looking for some advice on balancing tyre wear and general LR best practice regards tyres of different tread depths on the same and different axles.
There seem to be a lot of different opinions out there. Coming from a BMW 4WD background for the past 14 years, having staggered tyres and RFT with no spare, there was always limited scope for tyre rotation. General advice I’d always received and followed was to try to keep all tyres but particularly on the same axle within ~1mm of each other - to avoid the doffs and transfer box working too hard. This was never really an issue as the tyres all wore relatively evenly - fronts a little faster than the rears but not too different perhaps thanks to the 40:60 power split under normal conditions. When the time came I just had to change all 4 together. Luckily I never had a damaged tyre half way through a cycle.
Yesterday I was checking my tyre pressures and noticed a bit of a gash in the outer sidewall (between the ‘scorpion’ text and start of the tread). This prompted me to think about changing it before a long European road trip in September, perhaps with a matching part-worn, so I set about measuring the tread depth and figured I may as well check out all of them - which gave some surprising results..
Measuring at each of the four main grooves, from the inside out:
F/P - 7, 7.8, 7.8, 7
F/D - 5.1, 5.5, 5.5, 5.1
R/P - 6.8, 6.5, 6.5, 6.5
R/D - 5.8, 5.2, 5.1, 5.8 little sidewall gash
Spare - new, still has factory ink. 7.5, 8, 8, 7.5
As you can see the front passenger side has clearly been changed quite recently. There’s a significant difference to the front drivers side which is one of the most worn tyres.
You’d like to think that as this was a JLR vehicle and then supplied as an approved used, it’s been maintained within JLRs own guidelines including keeping tyre wear within limits on and across axles. Sadly my experience with any car dealership suggests they’ll happily cut any corners if it saves them money, and only wheel out best practice recommendations if/when it means getting more money out of their customers.
With that in mind, are there official tolerances that JLR have published or made known anywhere? If not what’s your experience with balancing tyre wear on your discovery? And how do your tyres wear - faster at the front, rear, one side or the other?
I’ll change all 4 tyres if I need to but would rather avoid it for obvious reasons. One other option might be to put the current spare and almost new front passenger tyre on the rear axle and get two new tyres up front. I can have the least worn of the current rears put on the spare wheel. This seems like the only way of having all tyres reasonably close in tread wear while only buying two new tyres. Would ~ 0.5mm difference between tyres on the rear axle be acceptable?
Would really appreciate the advice and benefit of experience from some seasoned LR owners.
- harrythespider
- Member Since: 19 Jul 2018
- Location: cumbria
- Posts: 404
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I think I would be taking the worst one off and swapping it for the spare then pairing them as best tread and swapping front to back. and side to side
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- Darras
- Member Since: 16 May 2020
- Location: Newcastle
- Posts: 749
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Latest advice I got from an independent tyre garage/fitter was do not necessarily rotate, have the newest/deepest depth tyre on the rear.
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