Re: radial tires on antique wheels

Posted by PackardV8 On 2013/5/28 11:44:39

THanks for the link HH56.
Owen Dyneto raises a good point in post #7 above.
Case in point, 1965 Chevies:

In 1965 go buy a NEW BOTTOM of the line FULL size chevy. IIRC Biscayne or maybe it was a DelRay. Got 14 inch very skimpy wheels and tyres. So skimpy the car looked like it was going down the road on 4 dimes.

SAME car, add a 283 V8 with a little ginger bread trim inside and out and call it a Caprice. It got 15" with IIRC F'stone wide Ovals or somekind of premium grade tyre. I don't think the radials were availble until about 1968 some 3 years later.

HOWEVER, BOTH cars got many sets of new tires thru out the cars life (say 20 years) as the tires wore out. Cars that originaly designed for bias belted and running thru late 70's early 80's got radials as replacements. NEver heard of any rim splitting on those.

The radial tire was not something that happened over nite. It was phase in during the late 60's thru early 80's. So any claims of rim splitting due to wheels designed only for bias belted is shallow at best since so many millions of vehicles (say 1950's thru 1980's vehicles) had tires replaced with radials when OEM was bias.

Isolated circumstances of wheel splitting would have probably happened anyway regardless of the tyre design.