While home with my family during the holiday break I joined my father on a short trip to a nearby town.
On the way there we started discussing the stories I was working on for Truck Parts & Service and I mentioned I was conducting interviews for an article on retread tires.
Almost on cue, we passed a detached tire tread on the shoulder and dad pointed, “You mean, retreads like that?”
Armed with the knowledge from my interviews from the previous week, I immediately jumped into action to disprove his claim.
I mentioned how the “unsafe retread tire myth” is just that, a myth. That today’s top commercial vehicle retread tires have the same minuscule adjustment rates as new tires. That retreading facilities today rely on a wealth of highly advanced technical machines to test and evaluate all potential tires before retreading. And that once a tire is deemed eligible for retreading, the true act of fusing new tread to a casing is done by highly sophisticated and automated machines — not a guy with a glue gun and some clamps.
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I also mentioned that almost all major fleets have active retreading programs. I mentioned that almost any commercial vehicle tire you buy today is built to be used multiple times, and then the big one, that retread tires cost about half as much as new tires.
