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My ‘04 F350 SCSB, front leafs, heavy springs, rode like a hay wagon, no matter the tires or pressures, or load in the box.. most of the time it had BFG AT’s, and Hercules winter tires.
The ‘06 CCSB, longer, coil sprung front, lighter springs, even with 20” wheels and short sidewalls at 65 psi rides like a Cadillac in comparison. Less steering wander than front leafs too. It rides about the same as an SUV, imo.
My ‘04 F350 SCSB, front leafs, heavy springs, rode like a hay wagon, no matter the tires or pressures, or load in the box.. most of the time it had BFG AT’s, and Hercules winter tires.
The ‘06 CCSB, longer, coil sprung front, lighter springs, even with 20” wheels and short sidewalls at 65 psi rides like a Cadillac in comparison. Less steering wander than front leafs too. It rides about the same as an SUV, imo.
Completely different machines.
Ahhh, that’s the difference. I have an ‘05 with 20” wheels and even with the stiffer front end rides pretty nice……well as far as heavy duty trucks go. The only way it rides nicer is with a half ton or more in the bed.
I ran Hankook AT for years on my Powerstroke. Until they changed them. My old tire guy got me started on Mastercraft after I bought my Tacoma. While far from a 3/4 ton, it’s overloaded and I destroyed two sets of four ply in 53k. At 220k, I’m 45k into the third set of ten ply MC Trail HD on that pickup and they’ve done me right. 60k a set is a good number for my work pickup. Put a set of ten ply of the same on the wife’s Expy when we bought it, and they went 68k. Maybe halfway through the second.
We can’t compare the mileage the 6.0 has on the tires since I moved and it doesn’t see the degree of highway mileage these days. It does much more farm and back road work, but I’m still wholly content with them. I’ll keep buying them until they change something and make them suck.
Toyo and Nitto are the only two tire brands I look at anymore for tires going on a heavy diesel truck. I used to buy BFG tires almost exclusively by default, it was just my go-to tire brand for years, but I learned the hard (and expensive) way that BFG's don't play nice on the heavy diesels (four sets of BFGs, at over $2k a set after taxes, met an early demise for me). BFGs work great on the lighter half ton stuff and the Jeeps, but not the heavy stuff.
Between Toyo and Nitto, just pick whichever one you can find the best deal on/ whichever one is in-stock when you want to buy, both are good IMHO.
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I ended up going with Toyo Open Country AT3 size 285/75/R16. They look thinner than the Falcons in the same size, but that's ok if they give me better gas mileage. I now have a lot more vibration at highway speeds. Going back for a re-balance next weekend. Same old story.
During my career, we would use occasionally use a test track. When we had to do tractor-trailer brake tests in the winter and couldn’t use the TRC facility in Ohio, I would contract with Smithers in Pecos Texas. The facility mainly did tire testing of all types, vehicle, truck, agriculture, and industrial.
A trick I learned from there was after a tire gets mounted to put a tire crayon mark where the valve stem is. This way you could tell if the tire walked on the rim. For us doing shortest stopping distance at GVW could easily move a tire after balancing. The tires on our vehicles would only last for one or two tests, so new tires about every two weeks. But I’ve done this on my own vehicles and occasionally, maybe having to make a hard stop or taking a curve at a higher speed, I’ve had a tire move on the rim. And then they are out of balance. Doesn’t seem to happen on my wife’s vehicle, though.
Just a thought, depending on how much tire lube is put on the tire and rent and what type of lubricant.
Back around 1998, I had bought a new Coats balancer for our shop. We were the supplier for many brake pads and shoes for Ford's OE lineup, and we got the Superduty contract. I tended to buy the vehicles we supplied, and in 2001, I bought an F-250 with a 7.3L engine. For our testing, we had both Superdutys and Excursions, and, as mentioned earlier, we would go through a lot of tires. For the test vehicles, it did not take long to unbalance a tire when you locked one wheel during the many stops per stopping distance test we had to do. But we also ran durability tests without such stops and sent vehicles across the country for additional durability testing, so you'd want your tires balanced. That includes when the head of vehicle testing owns a Superduty.
We never could get Superduty tires perfect. The Coats rep said they had a special adaptor for the Superduty wheels, but that did not help. I bought a set of BFG tires for my truck from Tire Rack, but could not get them to smooth out. I was re-balancing those tires once a week after hours, sometimes after a few days. I talked to Tire Rack since we bought a large number of tires from them, and the rep suggested using one of the shops they listed on their site that had the new Hunter Road-Force balancer. There was one by my home, which turned out to be a very good front-end alignment shop, actually called The Front End Shop.
I made an appointment, and Tire Rack called them to confirm my situation. My never-could-get-balanced tires were finally smooth. Like the old commercial for a shaving company, I liked the equipment so much that I submitted a new Capital Request to the company for a replacement tire balancer. That was no small feat, as I had just bought a balancer a few years prior, and it was still being written off. And this balancer costs three times as much.
Everyone in my shop was impressed by how well it did. Our company's Dyno facility was 100 miles north. Employees would take a day's vacation to bring their cars down so they could get their tires balanced after work. Engineers and salespeople from our Virginia headquarters would bring their own cars when visiting, rather than taking a company vehicle, so they could have their tires balanced. Naturally, that drifted off since they would find tire dealers who had the balancer when they needed new tires.
The equipment not only measures dynamic balance in a free state but also any variation in compression from road contact due to irregularities in the tire's construction, such as belt overlap or the wheel itself. If a tire is well manufactured, dynamic balancers do fine. But we used a variety of tires in our work and found the equipment superior. Is it an absolute - no. Tire Rack and the shop I went to said some tires still had issues, and if Tire Rack obtained tires that could not be corrected, Tire Rack would exchange them when you worked with the Tire Rack/shop connection, getting the tires delivered directly. But there still can be holes.
There was something I forgot to mention in the above post. When a tire is first installed on a rim and inflated, it may not actually be seated correctly. What the guys at Smither's test track also mentioned was that, for our situation, put the wheels back on our vehicle and drive around the 'hood, then balance the tires. That's a lot of work a tire store isn't going to do.
My facility closed in 2008, so anytime I get new tires, I use a shop that has that balancer. The newer machines have more advanced features than the one we had. And they have a feature now called massaging, which is exactly what the Michelin engineers were referring to when they said to set the beads with a driving loop before balancing the tires.
The entire process is labor-intensive because of the need to align the tire with the wheel, so it requires two trips to the changer and two to the balancer. Therefore, it's expensive. So some shops don't follow Hunter's complete procedure.
No way the tire shop had this car in there bay long enough to do that type road force balance
Funny thing is there Michelin tires and I’ll bet they didn’t seat the beads either but they would have seated by my next visit but still had vibrating after
in the video I like how he clocked tire to rim and cut the discrepancy about half
I need to find a shop that will do this or maybe specify to discount tire this type of road force balance hard part would be if they actually clocked tire to rim
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