Radial tires that look like bias ply tires

Chris Smith

another tip with tubes is to sprinkle them with body powder before installing them in the tire. It makes them slippery enough that they wont wrinkle and pinch when you inflate them. Also, because its dry, it does not promote internal rust on your rims.

faustmb

Doc - most US passenger car and light truck tires are still made this same way. The machines have more technology, but still very manual and spliced by hand as shown in the video. Around 5:40 in the video it shows the sidewall being attached. White walls and raised white letter tires just have a layer of white inside. After spending a week on this machine I'm surprised that some of these can be balanced. I offended the operator when I asked if the completed cores were the scrap pile :0 I'm talking sidewall seams overlapped 1"x3" on each side of the tire - ugly ...

There are new fully automated machines that are in their infancy, but they are very expensive and currently are used for extremely high volume runs. The smaller batches/ low volume tire sizes will be made on this style machine for a long time.

bob ward

I had no idea that tyre making was so labour intensive. 10,000 people making 25,000 tyres a day is roughly 3 man hours per tyre. All very interesting, thanks for the video Doc.

faustmb

These guys are humping it when running full speed, it's a very labor intensive job in a hot smelly factory. I forget the rate but its a tire ever few minutes with no idle time for the operator.

Geoff

That video would have been set back in the sixties most likely, when they still made tyres in Britain. Heck, we used to make them here in N.Z., and retread them, sometimes twice. Now, every tyre is imported and dumped once the tread depth is down to 2mm. We can still get some tyres re-capped, but there is only one place in the whole country doing them now. Paradox is that the recapped tyre tread outlasts the original by two to one usually, as it is a fully cured tread vulcanised on, hence much denser composition than a molded new tyre tread. I used to get my Essex tyres retreaded, then leave them down in the pit for two years for the rubber to harden.