With many of us setting off to see friends and family this weekend, it is important your car is up for the journey. Let us take a look at five tyre care tips that can improve your driving experience and make sure your car is long-journey ready.
A smooth ride makes all the difference to a drive, whether it is for pleasure or simply your daily commute. You may think that the smoothness of your ride depends entirely on the manufacturing process of the car, but you may be surprised to learn that a lot of it lies with your tyres. A poor suspension can cause ride issues, as can problems with the chassis, but most of the pleasure in a smooth ride is created in the tyre well. Problems in tyres can also occur if pressure is being put on your tyres due to lots of braking and acceleration especially if you are driving in areas like Scotland where the roads are always super crowded!
Have your Tyres Aligned
Tyre alignment refers to the way your tyres sit on the axles. If they are even slightly misaligned, they will either pull away from their partner on the axle, or push in together. Either of these scenarios is not ideal as it puts unwanted pressure on the tyre and the axle, causing excess wear and tear, greater friction and can even cause physical damage to the car. It also gives you a very bumpy and uncomfortable ride.
Have your Wheels Balanced
Wheel balancing is often teamed with tyre alignment as the two tasks are frequently offered as a package deal, but they are quite different. A car is designed to spread its load over all four tyres at the same time, with the weight carried equally between all the tyres. Wheel balancing makes sure that this is the case and that one tyre or pair of tyres is not carrying more weight than it or they should. The ride of a car with unbalanced wheels can feel smooth enough, but there will also be a precarious sense of being out of balance that can worsen at speed. The sensation that you could topple over at any moment is an unpleasant one, and will undoubtedly ruin the driving experience for you.
Have Good Quality Tyres
It may sound obvious, but buying the best quality tyres in order to enjoy a smoother driving experience for longer is one of life’s truths. While some things can be both cheap and good quality (tinned tomatoes, for example!) with tyres you get what you pay for, and paying one-third more for tyres that will last twice as long is an easy calculation to make! If you are not sure experts at Fife Autocentre will make sure you get the right tyres in Stirling. You can call them here on 01786 475066.
Have your Tyres Properly Inflated
Tyre inflation, in the early days of driving, used to be something of a guessing game, with expert drivers able to add necessary extra friction by deflating their tyres slightly or overinflating them to cruise through sticky mud without getting stuck. However, modern tyres are much more carefully designed and engineered than those early ‘bags of air’ and they do work best, in all conditions, when inflated to within the recommended range. So important is the right level of inflation now, that it has recently become part of the annual MOT test: if your tyres are not at the right level of inflation, you can incur a fail on the test.
Have a Look at Your Tread Depth
Your tread is the pattern of sinuous grooves that run around the whole circumference that makes up the contact area of the tyre, with some deep grooves and some smaller, thinner ones. This tread must be a minimum of 1.6mm deep around at least the middle three-quarters of the tyre’s contact surface in order to be legally compliant, but for your own safety – and that of other road users – it is better to have at least 3mm of tread depth over the entire contact area of the tyre. It is easy enough to check your tread depth yourself: all you need is a twenty pence piece. Stand the coin on its edge in the deepest part of the tread, and see if you can see the wide band that runs around the outside of the coin. If you can see it, your tread depth is too low and you should take steps to replace your tyres promptly.
