Tuesday, Oct 28, 2014 at 00:45
Good God, Dunlops! They aren't nicknamed "Banglops" for nothing.
I bought a Mack cabover prime mover in 1975 that was fitted with a mixture of
Dunlop and Michelin tyres. Without fail, every single
Dunlop fitted to that truck blew out before I could get full tread wear out of it.
In comparison, all the Michelins went to full tread depth and were then recapped and recapped again.
Not a single Michelin ever blew out in the 18 years that I owned the truck.
I once bought 4 new Dunlops for one of my Holden utes and all 4 Dunlops suffered carcase separation, to the extent they went so badly out of round, it was nearly impossible to hold the ute on the road, such was the imbalance.
A mate bought a new Mini Cooper S in the late 1960's and it was fitted with
Dunlop SP40's all round from the factory. The SP40's were reputed to be the ducks gonads.
The Mini was 3 weeks old when Arthur decided to "give it a wrap" and wound it up to 100mph (160kmh) on a nice straight stretch of country highway - with 3 mates on board.
Two SP40's blew out at that speed in quick succession, and Arthur lost control, the Mini left the road - somersaulted 3 times through a concrete culvert entrance, split in half at the bottom of the windscreen posts (a bad habit of Minis), and ended up back on its wheels on the far side of the culvert.
The roof had peeled right back, and all four blokes in the Mini just unfastened their seatbelts and stood up, there was nothing above them!
To say that Arthur promptly developed a life-long hatred of Dunlops is an understatement.
In 1997, I purchased a 32' (10M) tri-axle car transporter trailer that had previously been a 40' (18M) Viscount caravan transport chassis (this was a separate trailer frame, where the trailer could be taken away from the caravan).
The Viscount trailer frame had been converted into a tri-axle car transporter and fitted with 6 new
Dunlop 195Rx14C tyres.
I didn't use the trailer as much as I had envisaged (probably less than 5000kms) and I sold it in year 2000.
The bloke who bought the trailer, told me a year later, that every single
Dunlop on that trailer had blown out - and cost him a heap of money in replacement tyres - when he thought when he bought the trailer, that he would have no tyre costs, for a couple of years at least!
Cheers, Ron.
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