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Tire Valves and Accessories

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Thanks Marv, I'll have to check more for my rims. They are stock lariate rims but I now know what Costco was using don't hold up. Mine was the inside tire.

 

Chet, look for industry trade number 962C all metal (brass) clamp in valve stems, with a .453" grommet size, to replace the tire valves on your inside dually steel wheels.

Your 1999 dually may have originally came with rubber snap in valve stems on the steel inside wheels, with brass inserts. The XL and XLT versions of DRW trucks with all steel wheels had this type of tire valve. In an earlier post, Marv suggested they were steel, and that perhaps could have been the case with similar tire valves of that type, but the ones Ford used were made by Dill, and had brass inserts. The industry trade number to this genre of valve stems is 600HP.

There are often prefixes to 600HP, like TR600HP as an example, in part depending on the brand or distributor of the valve, ie Shrader or Dill, etc, but know that the suffix HP stands for high pressure. How high is high? In this case, 80 psi rated, same as the typical Load Range E 10 ply tire that is specified for the trucks that are fitted with this tire valve.

600HP's were an attractive option to OEMs when they were introduced, because they are faster to install by machines in production. They snap in, just like the passenger car tire valves... ie, the ones that Costco buys by the barrelful and keeps in the bin at the tire mounting machine. The industry trade numbers for snap in passenger car tire valves vary by length of the valve, and the valve hole in the rim that they snap into. The most common numbers are 412, 413, 414, and 415.

The 400 series and the 600 series snap in valves install in the wheel the same way... no nuts, no grommets, no tightening, no over torqueing, no muss, no fuss. Simple pull through, snap in installation. Previously (say 25 years ago and earlier), the Load Range E light truck tire applications had clamp in valve stems made of metal.

Screwing (literally) around with metal clamp-in valve stems takes more care and time, both in production and in service, but the problems with using the speedier to install passenger car all rubber snap in valves in light trucks are two fold:

1. The 400 series rubber snap in valves have a maximum pressure rating of 65 psi

(Costco should know this, and should not have installed such valves when selling tires rated to 80 psi, since the pressure rating is printed right on the tire they are installing)

2. The maximum rim thickness through which an all rubber snap in valve can be installed is generally limited to 4mm, or 5/32". Since wheels must meet both a weight and a pressure rating commensurate with the vehicle they are fitted to, it stands to reason that a steel truck tire rim might be a bit thicker than a steel passenger tire rim.

Enter the 600HP, which solved both problems, by incorporating a more robust metal sleeve inside the metal stem. Not only did the pressure rating get bumped up to 80 psi, but the annular groove that forms the seal around the tire valve hole in the rim could accommodate a 5mm thick rim, instead of just 4mm. Temperature tolerance was greater as well.

Tire jockeys are typically young, and they have to be trained to recognize the need to use 600HP valves in steel truck rims, as opposed to the 400 series valves which in more abundance at the tire machine. Both types of valve stems fit in the .453 hole size. (Except the 415, which is for the larger, less common .625" valve hole)

Keep in mind, this entire discussion is concerning steel rims, because it was your inside dually that blew. Obviously, aluminum and mag wheels are thicker, and typically are fitted with chrome plated or nickel plated clamp in valve stems anyway.

So... my point... (I'm surprised I remembered I actually had a point with all this rambling)... is that 600HP's were great for speeding production and service, but they are not so great for us on the road. The inside dual may be subject to more trapped heat that fails to convect out of the wheel well. Heat increases pressure, and if the cold inflation pressure was already set at 80 psi, than a 12% rise in pressure from the combination of hot roads, heavy loads, and the wheel well trapping brake and exhaust heat could lift the pressure to 90 psi. While the 600HPs may have an unpublished safety margin of 100 psi, it is still operating nearer to the limit of tolerance than what would make me comfortable.

I have personal experience with a 600HP blowing clean out of the rim, like a sidewinder missile. They are what Ford installed at the factory with a Load Range F tire rated for 95 psi. Ford later issued a recall of these tire valves, on F-450/550 vehicles only, as many chassis cab owners experienced blow out problems... enough to generate NHTSA's action. Ford denied that the valve application was the problem, claiming instead that the mechanized process of installing the tire on the rim damaged the back side of the valve.

I'll leave it to you to decide if that was disinformation, but the blow out problems didn't notably happen with the F-350s, but did happen with alarming regularity with F-550s. For example, I had three blow outs on factory wheels with OEM tires traveling at 65 mph or less. Soon after the recall, Ford changed to all metal clamp in valve stems in production on the chassis cabs with 19.5" tires. Not long after that, the F-350 duallys also got all metal clamp in valves in production... and that valve is identified in the tire valve industry as VS-962-C, the number I mentioned at the beginning of this post.


Ford eventually did replace three tires of mine, because of the recall. But the dealer farmed the job out to a local tire vendor, who, surprise surprise, installed 600HP snap in valve stems. I had to demount and remount the tires myself, in order to install the all metal clamp in stems that are rated at 200 psi, and can tolerate the stresses imposed by long reach pressure gauge wands and inflators that we have to poke through the hand hole of the outside rim in order to maintain the pressure of the inside dual to keep from having the blow out that you recently experienced.

 

^^ VERY nice essay on valve stems! ^^

My single-wheel 350 that came with alloy rims had 600HPs installed, and I personally had one leak last year after I installed aftermarket TPMS sensors out on the ends of them. The sensors are light, but apparently heavy enough to cause stem flexing at speed.

I was in Sayre, OK at the time that it failed, and it was sunset. After installing the fifteen-year-old factory spare (the good ones were buried at the front and under an entire capped bed full of merchandise), we drove only as far as Elk City before we had a tire shop change it the next morning. Of course, they used another 600HP, which is still on that rim, but WILL be replaced with the new stems I posted about in Post #11 above.

I really should have specified that the stems I recommended up there were for the sixteen-inch OEM alloy rims for SRW trucks only. This, however, has opened up a very-informative discussion on this subject, and it looks like we all can benefit by some knowledge of how Ford has cut corners, how some tire shops follow that lead, and how we can do something to lessen our chances of stem and subsequent tire failure.

For me at least, reliability is everything!

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Yes, and thank you for posting that. That was a very good explanation for sure. I took notes and wrote down the valve stem number. I will probable find these on my own. I'll probable buy a new set of tires next year. I did ask Costco if they carried the heavy duty stems even before they installed them. They did say yes couple years back but when it failed they told me I have to go out and buy them myself. I should print this out and have them read this, but like you said, most are just kids and really wouldn't care one way or the other.

 

For you and me both. We are on the exact same page brother! Reliability is what I look for in any replacement part or modification, even if it means a "downgrade" in performance. But it isn't really a downgrade when performance is measured in mean time before failure.


No, the kids won't care. Not even the managers will care. I bought a set of 19.5" drive tires from Costco. They had to be special ordered, and Costco refused to install them as a matter of policy. Costco isn't alone... neither will Sears Tire Center. Still, the savings on the tires (that are $430 each) purchased at Costco amounted to $100 per tire, and as you know, that adds up real quick on a dually. I bought a pair of tire irons, a hunk of brass, and found a piece of old carpet which I use to protect the rims as I mount and dismount the tires myself. For balancing, I use Centramatics, which balance the entire rotating assembly, including the brake rotors and hub, which is a hefty hunk of metal on it's own without the wheel and tire.

There are several styles of Clamp in valve stems used in Ford steel dually wheels. There is F-Series 16" hubcentric wheel, the E-Series 16" hubcentric wheel with 8 hand holes, the E-Series with 4 hand holes (and of those 4 hand hole wheels, a pre 1996 version, and a post 2008? version). Then there is the 19.5 wheels like mine, that have two different lug counts depending on pre or post 2005, but the 5-hand hole dish angle is the same.

And really, that is what the differences in the metal valve stem ANGLES boils down to... the ability to access the stem on the inside dually, along with the maintenance of clearance out of the dually spacing zone to minimize the stems vulnerability to impacts.

One of the issues with 600HPs is that they are longer than the 400 series, and have a heavier weighted mass at the end of that extended length. The extra mass is not only from the exposed metal insert, but also from the double sealing inflate through valve stem cap that Ford has issued as original equipment (in both plastic and metal iterations) for the last 20 years that I can say for certain, but very well could have been longer. There is a centrifugal whipping load on the valve stem as the wheel revolves 650 times per minute. Marv mentioned his TPMS heads wrecking havoc on snap in stems. If those same TPMS caps were on the shorter 400 series of tire valves, they might not have had as deleterious of an effect as on the 1/2" longer stems that in and of themselves are heavier.

Ford was proud enough of their decision to upgrade some of their valve stems to the all metal clamp in style, that Ford had this to say in advertising the 2006 model year changes:
Ford featured this change as an improvement... which evidences Ford's awareness that metal clamp in valve stems are superior to rubber snap in valve stems in DRW applications. It is rather disturbing to think about the number of highway incidents and catastrophic blow outs that had to occur over several years before the decision was finally made to spend what I can only generously estimate to be an extra $6 per vehicle (including installation) in order to make the tire and wheel assemblies safer.


If you are going to buy new valve stems for ALL of your wheels, including the aluminum ones (a good idea to renew even all metal stems, because it is very hard to get new grommets for the clamp in bases, and the Teflon seals inside the valve stem seals are best renewed anyway), then you'll need the trade number for valves appropriate for your fancy Lariat aluminum wheels. That industry trade number is VS-902WP. These have a chrome finish that blends well with the polished aluminum wheels. The 902WP's are also straight up and down, with no taper. This works well for the front, and you don't have to worry about clearance or extended length to clear a stainless skin, because your wheels are already dressed.

I used VS-902K brass finish on my 19.5" rims. On my E-series cutaway DRW, I'd go with nickel finish VS-918F, which are about 3/4 of an inch longer than the VS-902WP, but my E-series is of the era of 8 hand hole wheels, where each hand hole is a small circle, rather than a wide oval which an angled foot inflator can better fit through. The VS-962C that I recommended to you in my previous post for your steel dual wheels on your F-350 still stands, but I thought you'd like to know that the bend on those is 23 degrees, so if you were checking out the options in Marv's link earlier, you can look at the 23 degree choices with .453 rim hole grommets, that have an overall length of about 2 3/8". The straight chrome VS-902WP's are about 2 1/8" long. Both part numbers should INCLUDE the double sealing, threaded, inflate through valve stem cap. That's important to look for too.

 

Thank you Y2KW57, I appreciate all this information and the time it took you to post.

Chet

 

X2! Good info!

Reps!

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