A friend of mine won an auction for an old Cinci horizontal mill with boxes of attachments, cutters, tooling, vices, parallels and so on. Anyway, he asked me if I would provide transport for these items since I have an F350 crewcab, and he has a early 90's tubbed ranger with DOT slicks.

We arrived at the place he got it from and the forklift operator was a pro. She (yes, she) placed the mill just ahead of my rear axle rather than further back so the weight is where it should be. Some of the boxes of accessories were loaded around the milling machine, some inside the cab in the back seat legroom.

We stopped for breakfast and headed back on the road. After about 20 minutes into the one hour trip I noticed my truck "felt" funny, almost as if something was unbalanced - tire, driveshaft, something along those lines. I pulled over and we checked the tires and there weren't any clean marks on the rims indicating a weight had flung off. The tires looked okay and didn't pick up any gravel so we continued the journey to his house while I was running through the "oh now what" scenarios. Wheel bearings came to mind, as my rear wheel bearings have at least 200k on them.

We get off the highway near his place and the "flub flub flub" was quite significant. At speed it's annoying but below 10 miles per hour the truck noticably shakes. I couldn't tell by feel if it was in the front of the back of the truck because of the vast weight in the bed.

I backed into his barn/workshop under his overhead i-beam crane, and we lifted the machine out and slowly worked it towards the back where it was to be parked permanently. After unloading everything we took another glance at the tires and there it was...

http://frederic.woodbridgedata.com/p...-badtire-1.jpg
http://frederic.woodbridgedata.com/p...-badtire-2.jpg

When I pulled over earlier this "spot" must have been on the ground otherwise I certainly would have noticed this. I have many faults but blind isn't one of them. Not yet anyway!

I checked the tire pressure - 80psi - so it's not leaking yet so I drove the 10 miles home and parked in the driveway. Unloaded, the vibration and "flub flub flub" was much more pronounced and quite annoying. The worry of not making it home was probably equally annoying.

I guess I got my money's worth. This tire (and rim) as was it's match on the passenger side were purchased at Harry's famous "dollar day" so the rear set cost me $4. They've been on the truck for at least 50K so I have no right to complain!