Are you thinking about fitting retread tyres? The simple advice is: Don't.
I tested retread tyres for Wheels magazine in 2003 in the publication's annual tyre test. It was enough to make me doubt any purported justification for making retreaded tyres legal.
Shockingly, the retreads I tested added almost 10 metres to the length of a wet stop from 100km/h (and three metres from 60km/h). That's about
The most common cause of a tyre blowout is the pressure being too low. Here's why:
When a tyre is properly inflated, the sidewall is fairly stiff. There's enough 'give' in the sidewall, thanks to the pressure, to absorb normal bumps. However, the sidewall really doesn't flex that much in normal driving.
If a tyre develops a slow leak, however, the sidewall flexes more and more. At least the bit directly under the axle, subject to the car's weight, does. And then, as the car rolls forward, a new bit of the sidewall bends under the weight, while the bit that was bent like this just moments ago straightens back out.
You’ve just had new tyres fitted, added to the nation’s credit card debt (not to mention your own) via the retailer’s EFTPOS terminal and driven off the forecourt with fresh new rubber.
Feel like testing them out? Maybe right now isn't the ideal time. Here's why:
New tyres are coated in a material called 'mould-release compound', a slippery substance that helps their final extraction from the manufacturing process. It literally helps the new tyres be released from their moulds on the production line. Note that word: ‘slippery’.
New tyres are also kind of furry, you might have noticed, often with flexible rubber ‘stubble’ protruding from the tread face. These little fluffy bits of rubber are called 'vent pips'. They're formed as the rubber flows into little holes in the metal manufacturing dies. They prevent air bubbles from forming in the tread face by allowing all the air (and a little follow-on rubber) to flow out of the dies.
The Boeing aircraft company’s new 787 Dreamliner, which is slated for delivery to customers in the airline industry this year, could not fly without some 6.5 million lines of software code that keeps all its avionics and supplementary onboard systems humming along. This incredible amount of software code – a.k.a. computer programming – would take up no less than 197,000 pages of regular, lined A4 paper … if you chose to write it out longhand in your ‘spare’ time. That’s the number of pages in about 1200 copies of a magazine – comprising a stack of really informative dunny reads about eight metres high. That’s a lot of code.
But not compared with a modern, premium class motor vehicle. These have substantially more code – about 100 million lines of it. (Think: stack of magazines stretching 130 metres into the air – enough to plaster the hangers for a squadron of 787s.) So in a sense, your modern vehicle and your home computer network have a lot in common. Only, instead of three computers, a modem, a router, a couple of printers, two iPods and two plug-and-play portable hard drives, a premium vehicle is a lot more complex. In premium vehicles you’re looking at between 70 and 100 networked electronic control units
Here's a cautionary tale about the amount of energy packed into common liquid hydrocarbon fuels - and why you need to be immensely careful with them if you store even a small quantity of petrol - say five litres - in the home (say for the mower).
At 11.28am, Saturday 12 August 2000, a massive explosion ripped through