… then I did and the road noise is killing me! I don’t know why I never noticed it on other cars…I’m sure I was just as late on them or maybe I never rotated them at all.
So I’m considering having the dealership unrotate them… I assume that can be done with the result I’m looking for… or can it???
I understand that the life of the tire is impacted but maybe I already did most of the damage the first 35k miles. My initial review suggests that I’m not getting the gas mileage that I was before either…does that make sense?
I don’t think 35K will do it, but I’ve heard it mentioned (by Click and Clack) that if you go an excessively long time with rotating them, and then do it, that you can cause tread separation.
Personally, I’ve never been that hung up on rotating my tires.
They do, yes, but pushing the car down the street while it’s in park and the e-brake is pulled is terrible for them. Once in a while you have to rotate them so you wear our a different spot on the tire.
(I assume you were joking…right?)
Yup. I put top-quality all-weather tires on my Odyssey before we left California and drove it cross-country, then for about two years here, maybe 20-25k in mileage. Had a rotation, and the noise didn’t just jump in volume but in annoyance - a vibrating hum that has that overtone of fingernails on a blackboard. 1000 miles of driving only reduced it slightly.
All that for maybe 1/32 inch differential in wear. I’ve tried to find a shop that can shave tread to cure things like out-of-roundness, as I’m willing to lose 10k or so in net wear for a return to a quieter ride, but no one up here appears to have heard of the practice and I can hear them holding the phone at arm’s length and staring at it when I ask. (I even have a TireRack.com warehouse nearby, but not one that has tread-shaving equipment - it’s all done out of two sites.)
It was probably too late to swap back after that 1k mile “wear-in will fix it” period, so I’m stuck with annoyingly noisy tires until at least sometime next fall.
IMNSHO, tire rotation is in a class with 3k oil changes - for the fussy and (foolish-)cheap. I’ve never had a pair of tires wear out with more than about 2/32 difference front and rear, and getting another 5k out of a worn set of tires isn’t worth the hassle of swapping the sets frequently, much less collateral problems like this. Monitor your treadwear and swap only if it’s getting too different f/r.
As far as the OP goes, I’ve driven a lot of cars over the years, and have a fairly poor track record of rotating my tires. In fact, I usually don’t, because it’s not something I think about. However, when I do remember to rotate them, usually when the car is in for service for something else, I’ve never noticed a problem.
Having said that, My FIL was a professional mechanic in his day, and I asked him about this once. IIRC he said that rotating tires is a good idea but it’s not the end of the world if you don’t (tires will wear unevenly, causing a shorter lifespan, but safety isn’t really a concern unless you wear them past the tread).
If the tires are very soft, the car is extremely out of alignment, or they are directional tires, then I can see a problem.
I would go get the alignment checked before switching the tires back to their original position. If that doesn’t help… I dunno.
Check the tread depth. 35K might be approaching the life expectancy of OEM tires. And with radial tires, I understand you only have to swap them back/front, not driver/passenger side also.
I think crossing non-directional tires is still the done thing. Directional tires have to stay on the same side, or be physically removed and remounted on the other wheel.
What kind of car is it? Tire rotation is a bigger issue on some cars, both in terms of how they wear out front tires and in how much you feel it if they do get some funky wear. It’s also really important to keep up with rotations on certain types of AWD systems.
My guess from afar would be unfortunately that you probably need new tires. I’m guessing part of what you’re feeling is that the tires are probably down to the bottom of the tread on one of the edges. If that is the case, you may need an alignment, which would also explain the lower gas mileage. But some cars just normally wear tires like that and so you have to keep up with the rotations. One other more remote possibility is that you might have had a bad tire all along and you just didn’t notice it because it was on the back of the car.
At any rate, the first thing I’d do is take it in and have them look very closely at the tires. If there’s nothing wrong with them and they’re still in legal spec, a re-balance might fix it. If that doesn’t work, the problem might get better as the tires wear in in their new positions. If the tires aren’t showing any major uneven wear and the problem is simply inexplicable, you might try just rotating the tires back, but that’d be a very non ideal solution.
Not rotating the tires generally wasn’t a huge deal on old RWD cars, but on FWD you have the additional issue that the front tires wear out way faster than the rear ones do. So you end up buying tires in pairs instead of full sets. Having mis-matched tires or a large tread-wear difference isn’t a huge safety issue, but it’s definitely not best practice and can lead to some handling weirdness.
The guidance used to be that radials were not necessarily built as directional tires. Some with asymmetrical tread patterns were, but most weren’t. But after you ran symmetrical-tread tires for a couple thousand miles they took a set and became directional for that reason. Hence the guidance to not swap radials left/right but only front/back. If they were rotated at all.
So going back to the OP: What sort of tires are they? Which tires were moved from which corner to which corner? Were they re-balanced? Are they properly inflated now?
I don’t worry much about mismatched tread wear, but it’s usually easier to catch a sale on four tires than on two. It’s certainly proven cheaper for me in the long run to rotate tires and replace four at a time, especially since the guy I buy my tires from rotates them every 5,000 miles for free. He figures as long as it’s on the lift anyway you might buy an oil change and filter, and he’s usually right.
A lot of the rotation necessity in a RWD drive vehicle depends on two things- first, the rear wheels wear a little faster than the fronts overall, and second, depending on the camber, toe-in, etc… of the front end, your front tires may wear in a different pattern than your rear tires, which generally wear evenly.
So you rotate them to try and keep all that evened out to get maximum life out of the tires.
I don’t find it much of a pain in the ass- I get my tires from Discount Tire, and I only put about 6-7000 miles a year on my truck, so I just make a lunch appointment once a year and get them rotated for free. I imagine if you put 30k on your vehicle it would be kind of a pain though, but not even one in the same league as oil changes; even at 6k changes, you’d be looking at 5 changes a year.
As I said, “used to”. Rotating radials only front-to-back never side-to-side was the approved solution back when radials were new technology.
I just did some research and you’re 100% correct that nowadays there seems to be equal support for criss-cross rotation and front-back rotation. Which was news to me. Thanks. And for all practical purposes 100% of modern tires are radials, so the old radial vs. bias-ply distinction is obsolete.
I’m pretty sure all they did was rotate them. It’s 2013 Honda Accord with the original tires.
How about the gas mileage question? I’ve got to believe that if properly inflating your tires is advised for better gas mileage then whatever is causing this noise is even worse than that.
I’ve never rotated tires in my life. I buy the cheapest tires that will fit my car, drive on them until tread ware makes me feel that they need to be replaced, and then replace them all at once, unless one of them is individually damaged through some tire casualty. I like the feel of new tires, so popping for a couple hundred bucks every 25K miles or so makes more sense than buying expensive tires and rotating them and trying to squeeze the last mile out of them.
Tire safety is not an issue until there is excessive tread wear affecting traction. Even the cheapest discount tires do not just fall apart without warning.
It’s not that the shop screwed up the balance, it’s that as the tires have worn unevenly it may have thrown off the balance. You could also have just thrown a weight somewhere along the way and might not have noticed it until the rotation if it was on a back tire.
I don’t think there’s really any way the rotation itself could have caused the mileage to go down, unless they checked and reduced the tire pressure for some reason. Like I mentioned above, being out of alignment could cause the poor mileage and the funky tire wear, but you would have noticed the mileage before the rotation. Are you sure it’s not just a coincidence? Mileage usually tends to start to get worse as the weather gets cold and they switch to winter gas blends.
They can certainly try rotating them back and see if the problem goes away, but that should probably be a last resort in case they can’t find anything else wrong.