Thanksgiving 2019, bought my my Bigfoot 21 ft trailer. It has much larger than needed tires (ST225/75R15) for a tandem axle 7500 lb gross weight trailer. It had 2017 dated Hercules ST2 tires on it. I had heard good things about Hercules and figured they were OK. The spare was a 2007 dated GY Marathon (original to the trailer) and had never been on the ground. I replaced the spare with a new GY Endurance before the first trip. Put the Marathon on a 5x10 utility trailer where it still is. (the tire on the utility trailer had recently disintergrated due to age and more importantly, being on the south side the way the trailer was parked.)
52 mile ride home from the seller. Then about 250 mile trip to try the trailer out. Second trip out, got on the interstate about 11 miles from the house, about 4 miles up the Interstate, not even to the next exit, someone passes me honking their horn. About then I could hear a noise, pulled over. Found the right rear tire with no tread. The entire tread portion of the tire was gone, leaving the two sidewalls on the rim.
I changed the wheel, got off at the next exit, and started calling trying to find a GY Endurance. Ended up going to the local GY store and getting a new one installed and continued on the trip.
Returning home, I started removing tires to replace them. Spare was on a steel rim, so it went on the back, the one new tire stayed on. The tire in front of the blow wheel had metal wire embedded in it, so I scrapped it. On the left side. One had cracks in the rubber at the bottom of the tread, running fully around the tire. This may be what happened to the blown tire, so it too was scrap. The other tire showed no signs of problems, so I installed it on the utility trailer to replace a 1999 dated passenger car tire that I had put on it used, some years earlier. That tire was weather checked all over, but was on the north side as it was parked and not exposed to the direct sun.
Anyhow, now I have 5 GY Endurance tires. Bigfoot recommended tire pressure is 35 and the GY ST tire pressure chart is about the same. I have been running them at 65 psi for close to 8000 miles now and they seem to be wearing even, don't run hot (checking them with a cheap HF IR gun often) and I've been pleased with them. I just cannot bring myself to run them at 35 or close to that. The trailer runs smooth and doesn't seem to get beat too hard (it has shocks also). One of the new ones had a LOT of balance weight, so the next day I went back to Discount Tire and complained. The manager himself took it back and ran it on the balancer and found a indent in the sidewall he said was where some fabric had failed to meet or overlap. He ordered in a new one and replaced it.
When I swapped the tires to new
Sendel wheels in 2021 I installed
Dill all metal valve stems and
Centramatic balancers along with having them balanced at the tire store. The tires run glassy smooth on a good road. These tires never seem to lose any pressure either, which I attribute, in part, to the metal valve stems rather than the snap in rubber ones
I recently installed a
Lippert Tire Linc® RV Tire Pressure and Temperature Monitoring System (TPMS) on the trailer tires, but have not tried it out on the road.
Charles
