tires

do yourself a favor and check your old tires, I've been saying for the last few months that I should think about replaceing the ones on my '66 Bonneville convert. as they've been there longer than the ten years or so that I've had the car. [I bought it thinking I'd use it for a couple of years while getting one of the other two cars on the road] soooo,630 Fri morning somewhere around Orlando on the way to Daytona for the spring show at the speedway, bang !!! so we were lucky, the fender skirt skidded down the road shiny nside up and escaped damage and the hubcap got run over just before my wife could retrieve it, but we have spares . like I say, we were very lucky and like alot of others of us old farts, its just nhard to start buying new tires when the ones you're riding on still look like new. just the previous Saturday we were at a local show in Plant City Fl. and someone with a nicely restored '67 Firebird had a flat in the parking lot-looked like the steel cord just decided to pop out of what looked also like a new tire. I remarked to a friend of mine that I shoulod probably change mine ...hindsight. So anyway,keep you new looking old tires in mind. Now for my question, has anyone seen anyone making what I guess have become obsolete tire sizes that arn't mega bucks? 225-75 14 are N/A here except for the coker type of thousand dollar a set -seems to hold true for 14 and 15 inch 75 series--guess I'll end up with 70series and no more white walls! maybe someone of you
has a source- thanks

 

Good advice!
Some friends and I were at a swap meet yesterday and I scoped out a pair of nice tall frontrunners-they even had nice pinner whitewall stripes!
I flexed one of them and put weight on it and the stress cracks and age came out of them.No Sale!
Someone wrote you shouldn't run tires five years or older? UV rays or ?

 

My '59 Impala had a nice set of bias ply wide whites on it when I bought it. The whitewalls where a little yellow, so I knew the were old, but they had a ton of tread. One day I needed to stop quick, not even going fast, and the tires locked up.These tires were so hard they didn't even squeal,they just slid quietly accross the pavement like I had no brakes. If you're still thinking about leaving on thoses old wide whites 'cuz you want your ride to look cool, remember you are taking everybody's life in your hands.

 

Without going to Coker or one of the other antique tire places, 225/70-14 is about as close as you're going to get to the original size these days. They're still too short, but it's the best you can do. The Cooper Trendsetter was probably the last 225/75-14 made, and those have been out of production for a couple years now.

 

Good advice, my tyres looked like brand new when I bought the car, but within 100 miles I found they had gone egg shaped because they were breaking down inside - it was only luck that I discovered whilst fitting spider caps.