Tires

We did a lot of online research on Tires since our lives were now literally riding on them.  There’s been a lot of complaints about the tires that came with our rig with some calling them “China Bombs”.  We thought about replacing them but they had very little wear and were less than 3 years old.  Our truck, however, was a different situation.  We always take it into our local mechanic to look it over before a big trip. The tires were getting a bit worn down so we decided to replace all 6 to be truly road worthy for upcoming road trip.

By the time we got to our first real destination, Omaha, Nebraska, to settle in for a couple weeks, we had had one RV tire get a nail in it and be patched up at a Discount Tire. We had to kill a couple of hours before they could get us in so we pulled out the camping chairs and made the best of it in their parking lot. As it turns out, the nail didn't penetrate the tire but slid between the belts and tread. The kid at Discount Tire said they "patched it", I wasn't too confident in the tread not pulling away.

As we pulled into our parking spot in Omaha, we had a warning on our Tire Linc that another tire was going flat.  When I pulled that tire off to take it in, I noticed that it was going bald on the inside. Given these two issues we decided that it was time to replace them all.  For anyone counting that’s 10 new tires in about 3 weeks.  Ouch!  So much for the maintenance line in our new budget!

We thought hard about upgrading the RV tires to 14 ply but they run at a much higher PSI and therefore run a bit stiffer going down the road. There's also a question about whether they can be used on our rims or whether we'd have to upgrade to rims that can handle the higher PSI. We priced some other tires but wound up buying the Goodyear's. We've heard a lot of people reporting great results with the Goodyears and others complaining about blowouts. Time will tell whether we have issues or not.