Merityre Article Archive

We all know how a car can be prepared for use in inclement weather conditions. Car tyres can be checked, maintained, enhanced or replaced , as appropriate. Much the same goes for consumables including bulbs, screen wash, windscreen wipers and so on.  However, even the best prepared vehicle can come unstuck through poor driving.  Here are some salient points about driving in dreadful conditions…

Rain

Rain and sleet can rob you of vision and make off with much of your car tyres’ grip. You can counter this in two ways. As regards vision, the tactic is simple – drive only as fast as conditions permit. If it’s teeming down and spray is lashing against your windscreen, just slow down.

As regards the degree of grip lost to rain by your car tyres, the solution is once again perfectly simple. Your stopping distance will increase on wet roads. So, you need to leave more space between your car and the car/van/lorry in front.

Unless standing water is rife, the amount of grip your car tyres have for cornering should be adequate. Slow down if you encounter standing water. At best it’ll tug your steering about; at worst your tyres will aquaplane. Riding on the surface of the water equals no grip.

Fog

Fog has no effect on the amount of grip your car tyres give but it has a marked effect on how far you can see. ‘Drive as fast as you can see, and no faster’ is sound advice but there are tricks that sort out the safe drivers from the statistics.

Fog can be unpredictable to say the least. Remember that just because you can see half a mile ahead in mist doesn’t mean that visibility can’t plummet in a sudden, thicker fog bank. If you find yourself hurtling towards the unforgiving tail of a lorry at terminal velocity, the best car tyres in the world won’t help. You’re driving far too fast for the conditions.

Don’t be caught out on the motorway, as once again, impeccable tyres won’t help. Big lorries punch a nice big holes in thick fog. You find this out when you pull out of a lorry’s slipstream to overtake. In what might appear to be a clear lane, you could be in deep trouble in a second. Use your windscreen wipers and washers regularly – fog is water vapour; it and grime build up surprisingly quickly. And use your fog lights, especially those at the rear.

Snow and Ice

‘Softly, softly catchee monkey’ is an old proverb, which happens to fit the best approach to driving on snow and ice. Getting the best from your car tyres on snow and ice demands patience and finesse, not to mention a lot of forethought.

Of course, we have helping hands nowadays. ABS means that even though you can skid through steering, you can also brake while skidding. Under less extreme circumstances, you might find you car’s behaviour hasn’t a great deal to do with your inputs at the steering wheel and pedals. Once again, it’s a matter of going too fast for the conditions.

What to do when your tyres’ grip is compromised? It’s wise to do nothing with the brakes and throttle. Use your steering instead. Say your car is ploughing straight on. It’s understeering and you can stop this by straightening the wheel until the grip comes back. Should the car’s tail end go wandering off, you’re in oversteer. Turn the steering in the direction the tail is heading. You’ll save it then but you may have to counter-steer in the opposite direction.

In bad conditions, ‘caution’ is your watchword. Grip and/or visibility will be compromised to some extent by bad weather. Should the visibility and grip be terrible, put your feet up by the fire. Then you will live to drive another day.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the  leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

Maximizing your car tyres’ useful life is as much about being both safe and legal as it is about saving money in the long run. Your car tyres may not receive too much of your attention but a combination of forethought and maintenance will help you achieve the very best results for your car tyres.

Buy the right tyres

Car tyre choice is a matter of making an educated selection. So-called ‘long-life’ tyres may perform as advertised but can have downsides. They are liable to be noisier in use than ‘normal’ tyres, whilst also being less grippy. Similarly, ‘normal’ tyres could save you a few pounds but could let a higher performance car down grip-wise. The solution? Trust your tyre fitter.

Make sure your wheels are properly aligned

Given that wheels running out of alignment spell an early demise for car tyres, it’s worth having a wheel alignment check at tyre replacement time. Significant misalignment will show in odd wear patterns on the tyre treads, and can make the steering feel odd.

If you’ve encountered a big pothole, road debris, or have had an argument with a kerb, get the alignment checked as a matter of course.

Use the right pressure

You can usually find this out from a sticker on your car’s doorpost, or from your user manual. Too little tyre pressure can cause fuel-wasting drag, excessive tyre flexing and tyre failure through overheating. Too much air in your tyres can lead to premature wear and unreliable handling.

Drive with sympathy

…,for your car tyres, that is. Consistently taking corners at 9/10^th of your car’s (or your) abilities shortens tyre life. The same goes for aggressive accelerating and braking. Movie stunt men don’t have to pay for their car tyres!

Give your tyres a break

Following on from the previous tip, this kind of mechanical sympathy specifically concerns physical damage to your car tyres. We have, for our pains, got to put up with speed bumps and speed pads on our highways. We don’t, however, have to let them damage our car’s wheels and tyres.

The way to tackle these devices is to treat them as what they are – hazardous to your car tyres. Always cross them slowly. If you come across the kind of speed restrictor where there’s one speed pad per carriageway, never straddle them. Instead, let the wheels on one side of your car traverse them. Also, try to avoid touching a kerb, far less mounting one.

Driving like this will protect your car tyres, as well as greatly reducing the chances of expensive and/or dangerous damage to wheels.

These are proven practices that will prolong the life of your car tyres. They can also help save wear and tear on your car’s wheels, suspension and steering. Don’t be misled by knowing that car tyres are very tough indeed. They are tough but they aren’t invincible. Pay attention to the above and stay safe, and you will save money by not having to replace your tyres before their useful life ends.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the  leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

Suppose you were regularly wearing out a set of tyres on your Mini Cooper in three miles. You’d certainly be doing something very wrong, wouldn’t you?  However, this is the usual car tyre mileage on one of The Russ Swift Mini Display Team’s Coopers and Russ is doing something very right – in the eyes of his sponsors and spectators, that is.

The Team, part of Russ Swift Driving Services, was formed in 1981. Current British Autotest champion and England Autotest Team Captain Russ had often been asked to demonstrate his incredible, tyre-testing car control skills. He realised a gap existed in the marketplace and contrived to fill it.

In 1987, an advertising agency saw a video of Russ at work. This led to the renowned Montego “Car Park” commercial. Though this was aired in the UK for just six weeks, the squeal of tortured car tyres was heard when the performance was featured at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also voted by American judges as the world’s most imaginative car commercial.

Where did Russ go from there? A long, long way. Eight thousand tyre-munching displays in more than 50 countries and three Guinness world records (Parallel parking in the tightest space, J Turn in the tightest space and the fastest donuts) form just a small part of his CV.

Russ and Minis go back a long way too, starting with four British Autotest Championship wins and an International Rally win in Sweden in the early eighties, in a Cooper S. More recently, Russ was involved in promoting the remake of ‘The Italian Job’, performing at premieres in London and New York. He fulfils an advisory role with many police, military, royal and diplomatic drivers, also working closely with RoSPA, the IAM and various other road safety bodies to promote safe driving. A versatile player on the car world’s stage, Russ is committed to ensuring that it is only car tyres that suffer!

The tools of Russ’s trade are largely unmodified cars. Russ uses a Mini Cooper S, standard apart from a “piece of tape on the handbrake button”. Another Mini Cooper has one other mod – a locked differential – to allow for driving on two wheels (this is the one that gets 3 miles per set of tyres – should that be per pair?). Typically, a further Mini Cooper is used (all these are BMW MINIs). Often, an MR RS Mitsubishi Evolution undertakes power slides and donuts.

A typical show features reverse spins at 40mph, parking in a slot between two cars parked side by side, using only the handbrake. Similarly, ‘parallel parking’ involves a handbrake turn into the gap between two cars parked as though at the kerbside. Then there is a ‘dance routine’ to music, involving two cars and a ramp. This last – the ramp – is used for the business of getting the locked-diff Cooper up on two tyres. The show features music and commentary – and audience participation is encouraged. The tyres may be red hot but the invited passengers have been known to end up on the pale side!

Find out more – and see pictures and videos – at www.russswift.co.uk.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the  leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

On petrol cars, a catalytic convertor has become a standard part of the car exhaust. Catalytic convertors – ‘cats’ for short – originated in America. Like many other items, cats soon went transatlantic and later made their way into European legislation. Unsurprisingly, they wound up in the UK.

Let’s begin with the nuts and bolts of the matter. In chemistry, a ‘catalyst’ is a substance that causes or accelerates a chemical reaction without itself being affected. Fair enough but what has this to do with car exhausts? Still talking at nuts-and-bolts level, a catalytic converter is a device that uses a catalyst to convert three harmful compounds in car exhaust gases into harmless chemicals.

Again, fair enough but what are these three compounds that are so harmful? They are to be found in the exhaust  gas of any petrol car and consist of…

Hydrocarbons (incompletely burnt fuel)

Carbon Monoxide (formed when petrol burns)

Nitrogen Oxides (made by combustion heat making atmospheric nitrogen combine with oxygen.)

So, just how scary are these components in car exhaust gases? Carbon Monoxide, a.k.a. CO, is the nastiest one, being poisonous to any organism that breathes air. Nitrogen oxides (NO2) lead to the formation of both smog and acid rain. Relatively innocent Hydrocarbons (HC) just produce smog but are particulate matter, which makes matters worse.

A catalytic convertor, looking rather like a silencer, forms part of a car exhaust system. The catalyst used is liable to consist of precious metals such as rhodium, platinum and palladium. These coat a ceramic honeycomb or ceramic beads inside the ‘cat’. Carbon monoxide is converted into the less harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrocarbons are converted into carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O). As for the nitrogen oxides, these are converted back into nitrogen and oxygen.

Though they don’t have moving parts, ‘cats’ can suffer malfunctions. If the catalytic convertor in a car exhaust stops working, you won’t necessarily know about this until your next MOT test. A failed cat may just be worn out or its substrate (the metal-coated pellets or ceramic honeycomb inside) may have broken down. Your car may run perfectly well – it just won’t be able to pass the emissions test part of an MOT.

Often, diagnosing what’s awry with the cat in a car exhaust is tricky. If something has gone wrong with the car’s fuel system and it allows raw fuel into the cat, the unit will run red hot. This is usually pretty easy to detect, which is just as well, as the substrate can shatter at such temperatures. Fouled sparking plugs, incorrect ignition timing and failure of the engine’s air pump and/or check valve can also cause overfuelling.

Should the cat’s innards go into meltdown, or shatter through thermal shock or overheating, the result will mimic a blocked car exhaust. A sluggish throttle response is the major clue. Modern electronics mean that a fault light will flash to verify there’s a problem but detecting exactly what the problem is likely to involve diagnostics – on a laptop computer. In any event, should the problem lie within the ‘cat’, a good tyre and exhaust bay will be able to offer you a replacement unit.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the  leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

Car tyres can fail for a variety of reasons. Some are more common than others but all are avoidable with a little foresight. So, let’s look at some problems that can cause tyre failure, and learn how to avoid them.

Underinflation

Running your car tyres at too low a pressure has an immediate penalty. Underinflated tyres have higher rolling resistance than tyres running at the correct pressure. This means you waste fuel on pushing the tyres along the road. A less immediate but more punishing penalty comes from the same lack of pounds per square inch of air pressure inside the car tyre. Put simply, underinflated tyres can overheat. If the tyres overheat enough, it’s bye-bye tread or tyre carcass – i.e. it’s blowout time.

Inflating your car tyres correctly, to the pressure the car and/or tyre manufacturer recommends, is simple enough, and far less costly than new tyres or a spectacular blowout.

Overinflation

Given the above, it may seem logical to run your car tyres at a pressure higher than the one recommended. Wrong! Tyres running at too high a pressure lose compliance. Meaning? They can’t cope well with road irregularities and will be more easily damaged. Such damage can occur deep within the tyre carcass and lead to a dramatic high-speed failure. Once again, the solution is to keep your tyres inflated to the correct pressure.

Excessive Speed

If you’ve saved a few pounds by buying car tyres that are under specified for your car’s capabilities, there’s no profit in preening yourself about it. Car tyres have a speed rating, denoted by a letter on the sidewall, for a reason. More highly-rated tyres have superior internal structures and can lose heat more efficiently than lesser items.

While your insurance company will take a very dim view of your running on inappropriate tyres, worse things can happen. Under specified tyres can fail, especially in hot conditions.

A good tyre bay will advise you on which speed rating is right for your car. Take the advice: always buy the right tyres.

Overloading

Car tyres carry a load rating as well as a speed rating and this too is with good reason. While overloading may not often affect passenger cars (except perhaps those used for towing), bigger vehicles can be seen wearing underrated tyres. This goes for 4x4s as well as pick up trucks and small to medium-sized vans.

Once again, a tyre bay is the source of knowledge – if in doubt, have your current tyres checked.

Road Hazards

Which road hazards? Good question, given the road offers plenty of hazards. Those particularly affecting car tyre integrity are pot holes, debris and kerbs.  Hit any of these with any severity and you may damage a wheel, as well as a tyre. However, impact damage, even at parking speeds, can wreak unseen havoc within a car tyre.

When checking your car tyre pressures, look out for cuts, lumps and bulges – all can be harbingers of structural disaster in a tyre.

Excessive Wear

In these financially demanding times, it’s understandable for drivers to try wringing the maximum life out of their car tyres. That said, taking a car tyre down to, or even past, the tread wear indicators moulded into its treads is false economy, not to mention dangerous.

This is another thing to check when you get down and personal with your car tyres. Remember that well worn tyres can lack structural strength as well as grip.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the  leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

A car tyre must be inflated to work properly. Should you suffer a puncture, you can change the wheel concerned. Here’s how to do so in safety…

When

When to change a wheel becomes pretty obvious. A heavy pulling at the steering wheel and/or squirmy handling with assorted noises is usually sufficient to let you know a car tyre has deflated.

Where

Where to undertake a tyre change may seem obvious but this isn’t necessarily so. The first and most important rule is to never, ever try to change a car tyre by a busy carriageway, be it a on a motorway hard shoulder or at the side of an A-road. Why? Quite simply, it is hugely unsafe.

So, what if you’re caught out, on a busy road? Sometimes, it’s possible to coax your car to a quieter location. Bear in mind that you’ll need to find a level, firm surface to work on. If the car tyre has deflated fully, just pull up and call out the cavalry. The breakdown service will do the rest, after your mobile phone, or a roadside phone, has done its lifesaving bit.

How to prepare

A spot of preparation makes changing a flat car tyre much easier.  Pull up in your chosen spot, apply the car’s handbrake, put the car into gear (or ‘park’), switch on the hazard lights and set up the car’s warning triangle. This should be placed 45 metres (147 feet) behind the car.

The next stage in dealing with a flat car tyre is to have any passengers leave the car and stand well away from it, and from passing traffic. Then, it’s time to extract the spare wheel, jack and tools – your car’s handbook will tell you where they are to be found.

Jacking the Car

This step in the proceedings involves safety procedures, to which you must pay attention. First, you have to chock the wheel diagonally opposite to the one with the flat car tyre. No chock to hand? Then find a stone, brick or any other piece of debris that’ll do the job.

Time for your car to go up in the world. There’ll be a specific place under which the car jack must be placed. Once again, the handbook will tell you where this is. Do not improvise; only the proper jacking point will do. With the jack placed correctly, wind it up until it’s bearing enough of the car’s weight to not move.

Loosening the wheel nuts or bolts holding the wheel with the flat tyre comes next. These are always undone anticlockwise, with the wheelbrace that is in the toolkit. You may have to undo a locking wheel nut too – there’s a key device for that.

Now, wheel fastenings can be very tight. Use the wheel brace so you’ll be applying downward pressure (far less injurious if the tool slips). Loosen the fastenings first; the wheel can’t turn because it’s still on the ground.

Now, you can jack the car up. Do this steadily, until there is daylight between the flat car tyre and the roadside surface.

Changing the Wheel

Unscrew the fastenings completely one by one, removing the uppermost one last. You may need to ‘persuade’ the offending wheel to come off but be careful – over enthusiasm could cause the car to fall. For this reason, never let any part of you go between the car and the ground.

A car tyre and wheel combination can be heavy. Make sure that when lifting one, you’re on a firm footing with a straight back. Fit the spare wheel, securing it with the topmost fastening. Then, refit the remaining fastenings, tightening them only enough to seat the wheel firmly on the hub. Lower the car until the tyre is on the ground, and tighten the fastenings in a diagonal pattern. Now, you can stow the deflated wheel and tyre, put your tools away and continue your journey.

Finished?

Not quite, there are a couple of post-wheel change necessities. You need to get to a tyre bay, to have the wheel tightened to a specific torque – a repair on the flat car tyre is often possible. If you need to continue on the spare, you have to be sure that the car tyre on the spare wheel you’ve used is at the correct pressure. Finally, if the spare tyre is a space saver, there’ll be limitations concerning speed and distance. The car handbook will show you what applies.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

‘If in doubt, blame the computer’ is an office standby. When it comes to car tyres, there are plenty of instances when it would be appropriate to say, ‘Thank the computer’. Several computer-controlled systems optimize car tyre performance these days. Let’s pick our way through the acronyms and look at some such systems.

ABS a.k.a. the Anti-Lock Braking System has its roots in aircraft technology. Gabriel Voisin, a French aeronautical and automotive engineer came up with it as far back as 1929. Forty-two years later, ‘Sure Brake’ appeared on the 1971 Chrysler Imperial. It’s now hard to find a single car tyre whose stopping power isn’t maximised by ABS. Here’s how it works.

Enter the ECU, or Electronic Control Unit, which is what is in charge of ABS. Imagine a car tyre is rotating more slowly than its fellows. A wheel speed sensor detects this, and tells the ECU. The ECU, in turn, opens a hydraulic valve to divert brake fluid pressure away from the locking wheel, until the tyre in question speeds up again. The system can do this at up to 20 times per second. The result? On a wheel that isn’t quite locking, the car tyre is gripping at maximum efficiency. A locked wheel offers virtually no grip, while a wheel nearly at locking point can still offer steering and braking force.

EBD (or EBFD) is a refinement of ABS. This acronym stands for Electronic Brake Force Distribution. On the old, ‘classic’ Mini, for example, there used to be a mechanical inertia valve, which would reduce braking force to stop the rear tyres locking under heavy braking. EBD does the same thing, far faster, far more accurately and in relation to each car tyre simultaneously.

Strange as it may sound, ABS can help a car tyre achieve maximum traction under acceleration. TCS – the Traction Control System – uses the ABS’s wheel speed sensors to detect if a car tyre on a driven wheel is spinning (i.e. not gripping). The TCS applies braking force to the spinning wheel for a few milliseconds. In more sophisticated TCS systems, the throttle can be cut briefly, preventing wheel spin.

Speaking of sophisticated systems, we can now look at ESC (Electronic Stability Control). This again is ABS-related. In ESC (or DSC – Dynamic Stability Control), two further sensors play a role. One detects the angle of the steering wheel, while its gyroscopic stablemate checks this angle against the car’s direction of travel. Should the figures not add up, the system applies braking force to individual wheels. Once again, each car tyre is maintained at its optimum level of efficiency in any given circumstance, by the application of very short pulses of braking pressure, and/or throttle input, as appropriate.

Here’s where further refinement steps in, and where we become awash with acronyms. It’s probably best to think of the refinements under the ACC (Adaptive Chassis Control) banner. Often using a button, with markings such as ‘Comfort’, ‘Sport’ and even ‘Race’, a car driver can dial in all manner of changes to how his car responds. While the stiffness of physical springs can’t be changed electronically, the firmness of the suspension can, by the actuation of electronic tweaks to suspension damper rates. While the car tyres don’t change, that which controls them can. It’s possible for driving force to be distributed according to car tyre grip across an axle and, in some cases, between the front and rear wheels.

The bottom line about these immensely clever, capable systems is that they use car tyre grip as a benchmark. When the car tyres are offering optimum grip, tyre performance – and therefore the performance of the car – is necessarily optimized.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

We may not view them for very long but movie star cars live on in our memories. Not all movies featuring memorable motors are car chases wrapped in sub-plots. That said, car tyres aren’t just for these four-wheeled screen idols to sit on. Yes, rubber was burnt in many instances. The tyre-smoking heroes here have one thing in common – they’re all from the ‘States. So let’s take a look across the pond at some US-born petrol-driven thespians.

The 1971 film ‘Vanishing Point’ is a classic car chase wrapped in celluloid. Starring Barry Newman and Cleavon Little (who went on to great things in ‘Blazing Saddles’), Vanishing Point revolves around a fifteen-hour, transcontinental drive from Denver to San Francisco. The star car tyres doing the revolving in the film were fitted to a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T, the suffix letters referring to ‘road and track’. This 6.2-litre monster, driven by Erich Heuschele, developed the power of 375 gutsy, all-American horses. The car’s F70x14 car tyres put the power onto the tarmac, with the aid of the Challenger’s R/T package. Interestingly, the same model in the same colour popped up in Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 movie ‘Death Proof’. What’s more, the Challenger’s pedigree goes back in time. The black car driven by the baddies in ‘Bullitt’ was a 1968 Dodge Challenger 440 R/T.

More tyre-smoking Detroit iron finished in black starred in 1977′s ‘Smokey and the Bandit’. The motorised matinee idol here wasn’t Burt Reynolds, it was a 1977 Pontiac Trans Am. This car’s history can be traced – it stemmed from a General Motors Design show car created for GM design supremo Bill Mitchell. On this Trans Am, the car tyres were put under pressure in more than the literal sense. The car’s 7.5 litre V8 motor became the last of the muscle car engines. Increasingly stringent emissions regulations in the US finally killed off these big V8 beasts in 1980. The stunt team on ‘Smokey’ pre-empted this, killing off, or at least damaging, all five film cars.

Now for something more unusual, though still in black paint. The next movie star was built using three Model T Ford bodies and a 133-inch hand made chassis. The Munsters Koach was created in 21 days in 1964, at a cost of $18,000; it took 500 hours to make its ornate steel scrollwork alone. Another big V8, by Ford this time, sent the power to the tyres via a four-speed manual gearbox, and the brass radiator and wings were hand formed. The Koach had ten Stromberg carburettors. On an eight cylinder engine? Not really. The visible carburettors were dummies, concealing two functioning four-barrel carbs.

In the Munsters, Grandpa, played by Al Lewis, became more than a little jealous of the Koach. So he acquired ‘Drag-U-La’. This vehicle was notable for its spindly front tyres, mounted on Speedsport English buggy wire wheels. The V8 engine’s 350 horsepower was transmitted to 11 inch-wide Firestone racing slick car tyres, mounted on specially made ten-inch deep Reynolds aluminum Rader drag wheels. Still more characteristic for a ‘vampire’, Drag-U-La’s body shell was a coffin. The original Drag-U-La, one of four built, hangs from the ceiling in Planet Hollywood, Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Who was the talented creator of these last two oddities? The man responsible for putting a lot of tremendously memorable tinseltown tin on tyres. Yes, it was none other than Batmobile creator George Barris.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

The usual seasonal symptoms are back again. In the UK, winter presents a series of tough tests for car tyres. As well as your tyres, it is you who are on test – drivers, rather than cars, generally cause accidents. Here are some salient points about winter driving…

Snow and Ice

A mountain climber’s crampons, the tracks on a Caterpillar tractor, the toothed drive belt on a snowmobile…certain things are made to grip on snow and ice. Since (with some exceptions) you can’t fit such things on your car, you have to cope, using the tyres your car usually wears. There is, however an option. When the temperature drops, your usual tyres will lose flexibility. Winter car tyres are designed to retain their flexibility at lower temperatures, so it makes sense to invest in a set. Motorists are discovering that such car tyres really do offer significantly enhanced grip and control, and using them on a set of  (preferably steel) ‘winter wheels’ will preserve your usual alloy wheels from the ravages of salt and grit.

What are the exceptions? Countries with permafrost can be home to car tyres with studs. In the UK, seriously bad conditions can trigger the use of snow chains. A new item occupies the middle ground. Snow socks are car tyre covers made of a tough, woven material. Easier to fit and quieter than chains, they can be useful when drivers are caught out by unexpected snowfalls. Bear in mind that they will wear out in no time on tarmac.

Rain

When it isn’t quite cold enough to snow, rain and sleet present car tyre challenges of their own. Reduced visibility is a foregone conclusion but don’t forget that wet weather compromises grip. Your car tyres will move surface water but a wet surface remains relatively slippery. Remember to leave more room between you and the vehicle in front, to allow for increased braking distances.

Flooding

Lots of rain can lead to flooding. Standing water can be dangerous. When your car tyres hit it, you’ll feel the steering wheel pulling in response. At worst, your tyres may aquaplane. When the tyres ride on the surface of the water, suspiciously light steering signals radically reduced grip. If you feel this, lift off the throttle and slow down until the grip returns.

If you encounter a flood, remember that negotiating it requires care. Keep to the crown of the road, where the water will be shallower, and look out for the white line. This will help you gauge the depth of the water. While you can trust your tyres, remember that your engine, if it sucks in water, will be wrecked. Keep the engine revs up to help stop the exhaust inhaling water. However, if you are in any doubt whatsoever about the depth of the water, use another route.

Fog

In thick fog, you’re bound to suffer loss of visibility. Your car tyres won’t suddenly offer greater grip just because you notice that you’re hurtling towards the back of stationary truck. So drive as fast as you can see, and no faster. Remember to use your windscreen wipers and washers often in fog; your screen can collect water and grime surprisingly quickly, further reducing visibility.

In winter, the watchword is caution. Even on winter car tyres, grip will be compromised to some extent by bad weather. Should the visibility and grip be truly awful, simply put your feet up by the fire and live to drive another day.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.

Car tyres don’t generally ask too much of you. However, neglecting them can prove expensive and, in some circumstances, dangerous. These ten tips will enhance car tyre life, reduce your spending and perhaps save your life.

1. The wrong car tyre pressure is costly. Running on overinflated tyres accelerates wear and reduces both grip and ride comfort. Underinflated tyres also wear more quickly, and can worsen fuel economy by as much as ten percent. Check your tyre pressures regularly.

2. Cuts in car tyres are obvious. Lumps or bulges may be less so but they tend to indicate damage inside the car tyre’s carcass. Check for any such damage while correcting tyre pressures. If in any doubt, avoid the risk of a blowout by having a tyre specialist examine the damage.

3. A spare wheel with a flat tyre is worse than useless. Check the spare tyre pressure regularly, unless you have run flat tyres or an onboard tyre pump and repair kit. Remember that space saver spare tyres generally have speed and distance restrictions.

4. If, at car tyre checking time, you find a stone embedded in a tyre tread, you can lever it out before it causes damage. However, if you find a nail in a tyre, leave it alone. The nail will be temporarily keeping the air in – have a tyre specialist take a look. He may be able to repair the tyre.

5. While using the tyre inflator at a garage, or a tyre pump at home, look after the tyre valve dust caps. They keep dirt and grit away from the delicate valves, and are a line of defence against tyre pressure loss. Always put them back carefully.

6. Potholes can damage more than your car tyres. Hit a large one hard enough and you could be facing a bill for the repair or replacement of one or more wheels. Should you be unlucky enough to encounter a big pothole and suspect damage has occurred, stop and examine the affected wheel(s) and tyre(s).

7. Never straddle a speed bump. Instead, let the wheels on one side of your car pass over the bump. This will prevent damage to your car’s tyres, steering and suspension. When negotiating speed bumps and road-width speed pads, slow down or face the cost of repairs.

8. When you’re manoeuvering, curb your enthusiasm so you don’t kerb your car tyres. Kerb impacts can wreck not only tyres, they can scratch, chip and even dent your car’s wheels. Steering misalignment can also result from kerbing.

9. Keep your car in a garage, if you can. Car tyres suffer from prolonged exposure to ultra violet light. This leads to cracking and crazing of the car tyre sidewalls’ structure.

10. When the time to buy replacement tyres rolls around, think about replacing all four. Should this be too costly, always have new tyres fitted in pairs. It’s accepted that the new tyres should be fitted to the rear wheels.

Article Resource

Merityre.co.uk are one of the leading UK independent suppliers of car tyres. Why not visit their website for an online tyre quote or contact your nearest fitting centre.