Caravan Tyre Wear

Looks like low pressure and needs shockers

Regards
Oldpop

Only one side of the tyre ?

You could have a bent axle.

Regards

Derek from ABR.

Hi there, I am no tyre expert, but 50 PSI seems like one heck of a lot of tyre pressure for your single axle van?

We used to have a single axle 16 foot Jayco running on light truck tyres & if my memory serves me correctly ( & it's buggered!!) the van compliance plate stated about 32 PSI. The Tare weight on the compliance plate stated 1180 Kg. & whilst I never put it over a bridge, I always did an "educated" calculation of the weight of stuff loaded into it & therefore worked on a gross van weight of about 1500 Kg.

We used to actually run them (cold) at 35 PSI & never experienced any problems.
Is there some reason why you run them at 50 PSI?

Hi. It is normally caused from misalignment. If you can place a straight edge across the drum face measure around 400mm in front and 400mm behind the drum and put a mark on the chasis. If you can measure from the edge of the straight edge to the face of the chasis at each 400mm point, the front measurement should be around 1mm less than the rear. (For example, 249mm front measurement, 250mm rear) I think much more variation than about 4mm will cause your problem. I had to adjust simplicity suspension recently that was doing the same thing on the LH front tyre and found the LH side toeing in 19mm and the RH side 4mm. The measurements still apply to single axles. Regards,Bob.

I had similar wear but not as bad as yours. I had the local tyre bloke have a look and he said it is normal for trailer / caravan tyres to wear like that.
He said if you were to put them on a car/ ute they would flatten out real quick.

I think their is some merit in rotating tyres if possible.

Apart from the wear on the shoulders the uneven lug hieghts is similar to my camper trailer tyres. Don't worry too much.

Cheers Scoof . :-)

Most single axle vans have a payload weight of 300kg and a tandem has a 400kg limit except things like offroad vans like Kedrons etc

Seems strange that yours has 600kg and does it actually weigh that.

Perhaps why you bent the previous axle.

Hi all

The van is actually a Kedron but has been modified and upgraded by the original chassis manufacturer to a revised ATM of 2600kg. All components are rated at 2600kg or better and it has all been approved by a QT Inspector. This was necessary in order to be safe and legal after we added extra batteries, solar panels etc.

According to weighbridge dockets, the Tare is now 2020kg, and fully loaded with all gear aboard, full water tanks, gas bottles etc. the weight is 2450kg. The tyres are rated at 1380kg each at a maximum of 80psi, which is adequate for the load. We’ve travelled over 50,000km in the last 18 months over many of the worst roads in Australia and have never had a puncture. This is probably because we have run pretty low pressures on the rough stuff as our philosophy has been that it’s better to sacrifice the tyres and save the van.

Unfortunately this has probably also led to the pattern of wear but the van itself has survived brilliantly with no structural damage at all. The axle had to be replaced as it had a slight bend on the right hand side after we hit a very deep, well concealed bulldust hole too hard. The bend wasn’t bad enough to be visible even to the guys who replaced the axle for us and the only way we found out about it was when we had a wheel alignment done thinking that was causing the tyre wear. We were actually told that it would probably have been fine the way it was but we didn’t want to take any chances considering the sort of roads and the isolation involved in our travels.

The van rides beautifully and is a dream to tow at any speed so I don’t think there is anything too bad going on. It sounds as if the tyre wear could be just pressure related and also attributed to the fact that we’ve done so many km’s on them in some pretty tough conditions.

Thanks to all who have taken the time to reply and all suggestions will be taken on board and checked out.

Cheers