Driving down I-95 last week I was intrigued to watch one of the wheels on a semi disintegrate into a flurry of shredded rubber – clearly the source of all of the scraps one sees on the road-side. After a mile or so, the trucker must have noticed, for he pulled off onto the shoulder. That leads to the inevitable question: what happens when a semi has a blow-out? Can he simply use the remaining 17 tires to drive to the nearest garage for a replacement? Do they even carry spares?
Over the road trucks often carry spares. Those tires cost around $300.00.
But the equipment to change a truck tire is very heavy.Not something you just throw behind the seat.
He’ll either call a tire repair truck or limp into the next repair place.
I have changed tires on my truck on the road. (Well, once, but that was enough.) All you need is a small hydraulic jack and and a big honkin’ wrench. You also need a spare tire and a lot of strength to do it. Limping to the next tire shop is not usually an option, the flat tire would heat up and catch fire. ( yes, this happened to me too!) The best option is to limp to the closest coffee shop, and ophone your friendly tire repair guy, They can usually fix it without taking the wheel off.
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- A guy who drove said that you could feel it, the vehicle shimmys a bit when the tire blows, and then you need to stop and put a tire on because if the load is heavy it makes the others blowing more likely.
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- He said you can do it but his company didn’t even want drivers changing or fixing tires themselves for insurance reasons; he had a tow/rescue service he called and they would hook up a local repair truck, wherever he was.
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I got to witness a rather dramatic example of this in my EMT days, that ended with all 4 tires on one side of a trailer in tatters about a minute after the first one blew. Luckily for us we were running just behind him two lanes over so we were not in the trail of tire debris that scattered all over a 1/4 mile strech of freeway.
drachillix
How the hell did that happen?
Not all flat tires are created equal.
In my days of driving a cement truck we’d often drive with a flat, if it were an inside dual,
when we were busy. It was the dispatchers call.
It really depended on how far behind he was.
We wouldn’t usually go out of town with a bad tire but still…
What happens is at highway speed the tire begins spinning on the rim. That heats it up and finally it tears apart.
When a big tire goes, they sound like a shotgun. If it’s a steering tire, you pull over and call it in. If it’s a drive or trailer tire, I’ll pull over, call it in and they’ll usually tell me the location of the nearest place I can go to have it fixed.
When a tire at speed goes, often (if it’s a retread) the tread sort of peels off and decorates the road. Depending on the load and position of the tire, by the time you get to a repair place you might have just 2 sidewalls left or you might have the tire casing. Tire casings, if not too badly damaged and the sidewalls are undamaged, can sometimes be recapped and reused.
I assumed they would too, but it seems that truck drivers sometimes (often?) don’t hear them go from up in the cab. When I was in California earlier this year I was driving a hire car one night and noticed a nasty smell of burning rubber. At first I assumed it was from a tyre fire off the road somewhere, but it kept getting stronger for a mile or two. Then I heard things like gravel hitting the front of the car, and the windscreen started to get sticky shreds of molten rubber over it, and I could see that it was a big 18-wheeler happily barrelling along with a shredded tyre, seemingly oblivious to the trail of crud he was leaving behind. The wheel rim was actually striking sparks off the road. I flashed my lights at him repeatedly, and other cars did likewise, and eventually I saw him in the rear-view mirror start to slow down and pull over.
But he must have driven at freeway speed for at least 5 or 6 miles with a blown tyre, so I can quite see that tyres could catch fire if the dirver didn’t notice.
My guess at the time was a combination of heavy load and damage to the remaining tires from debris of the first tire. My partner that day was part time EMT/Full time school bus driver (class A CDL holder), she said she has heard of that happening but its rare.