Quote:
Originally Posted by w-lewis
Thanks for the feedback. Do ya'll think my old tires are really unsafe?
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For a while I drove on 20 year old BFG's (had no idea they were that old)...the rubber was so hard that the front tires just separated. One blew while I was on the freeway going through Houston, TX...it was so destroyed that I hired a tow truck to get me to the nearest Discount Tire. The other "delaminated", for lack of a better term, while it was sitting in the mechanic's garage waiting for its turn on the rack...remember "retread" tires and how that "retread belt" would delaminate from the body of the tire and all that would be left intact was the carcass? That's what it looked like...so, yeah, I'd say it's dangerous to drive on old tires, for sure!!!
I'll not drive my replica again without new rear tires, too...regrettably, I had no good options at the time the two front tires self-destructed, and so I put new BFG/TA's on the front...but I'm going with M/T's on the rear wheels when I get back down to TX at Thanksgiving. I'll also try to drive it back to Kansas at that time, which will be a VERY cold two day trip if the weather is bad (I'm taking multiple layers of very nice insulated "inner wear", good gloves and a snowmobile suit, but if it's cold my face will probably get frostbitten without some sort of ski mask.) The BFG/TA's on the front will just have to last for a little while, I guess...but they'll get replaced soon as I can!
It's times like this that I wish I could have afforded a GT40 replica, at least those can be made into 4-season vehicles. We're definitely at the mercy of the elements in our roadsters
Cheers!
Dugly
