How often do you retread your tires?

Never.

Virgin new rubber once a year after first frost or first break traction on ice somewhere in the USA. Older tires go to spare for flats.

We have NEVER lost a retail tire. Retreads certainly all the time. Big zipper failure bombs and so on.

This is strictly me. I am very expensive on tires but they pay for themselves over the year.

 

As far as I know FFE put them into the spares or onto the trailer and we rolled em. They had a tire shop area and it was their problem. Just 10 virgin retails every october every year. Ran about 221000 on one set in 10 months flat and they were still about roughly 1/3 or so to the good on tread when we turned our tractor in. (Team...)

It was probably one of the first tractors we had where there was no brake work, no clutch work and none of the tire troubles for a entire year essentially. One of the best in that way ever. A dream. It did have a habit of eating alternators, batteries and front ends as they always did.

Correction.

We did have one Yoko steer tire replaced due to bad factory defect that showed up on ice in Nevada when the internal steel belting failed. Shook us all the way through the steering column and a whole lot of dancing on ice. That got replaced fast, both steers that day.

 

I'll never do it. As a company driver the very first time I was told to get a retread, the wheels looks great and I got a mile down the road and half of the tire came apart. I had to go back and wait for them to order real tires.

 

The 8 drive Generals I got in 2016, I paid $2800 for and I've run 260k miles on them already and they still have 8 -10/32 meat left. I don't do recaps, I always had bad experiences with them, the initial savings are gone quick when one of those peels off with explosion and you have to buy an air bag and a brake chamber in addition to a road call..

 

I don't see the savings...
My last set of steer tires 230,000 miles, I buy new Michelin only for steer and drive, it worked out to about 0.005 per mile for steers.

Just did drives. 290,000 miles, replaced Michelin energy with xdn2, cost worked out to 0.016 per mile. I expect the xdn2 to be slightly lower cost over time. We will see. I prefer xdn2 anyway. Those energy tires can be kind of squirrelly in less than ideal conditions.

These numbers are in Canadian currency. So multiply by about .75 for usd conversion today. I see no benefit of going to the expense of using recaps. Not to mention they are inferior in summer heat. Never had a blow out doing it the way I do it. Why change? Sell me on it, if you can.

 

At what depth do you replace them? Mine seem pretty shallow and its Winter driving as we speak. Some advise to re-groove them but I don't like the idea.

 

I cap my steers one time for drives. Been doing it for 15 or so years. No problems so far.