Re: [A/S] Explorer Stability?

[Gary Quamen <gquamen@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi folks:

I have been thinking about this subject for some time now and have
something to offer that may or not be worth the typing (or reading).

My '92 Ford F150 4WD pickup came equipped with the subject tires,
although I have since changed to another brand.  I never had any trouble
with the tires.  Early on I noticed that the manual called for a cross
pattern rotation, which results in the tires being run "backwards".  IOW,
when you take tires that have been run on the driver side of the vehicle,
for instance, and put them on the passenger side they rotate the
in the opposite direction.

This is something I never do with radial tires.  Maybe it's because
that's the way "it used to be", but I've never heard otherwise.  When
this first came up in the news, I checked both my wife's car manual and
the one for my truck, in some kind of a "sanity check".  Her car, a Honda
Accord called for "front to back" rotation only.  My truck, however
called for a "cross rotation".

Like I said, I have always rotated "front to back" and have never
experienced a tread separation.  Once however, I gave my son's college
roommate a pair of spare Goodyear radial tires that I got with a pickup I
bought.  They were marked with chalk, L & R so they wouldn't get mounted
in a way where they would run backwards.  The kid was going to LA from
the Bay Area (~400 miles) and needed some better rear tires for his
truck.

A week or so later, I got a call from the kid and he was all POed.  It
turned out that one of the tires delaminated on the Grapevine just before
LA and the other in about the same place on the way back.  In both cases
he had to pay gas station prices to have new tires put on.

I didn't know what to say.  I thought I had done a nice thing for the
kid, but I could see why he was mad.  After thinking about it for a while
I asked him how he mounted the tires (L&R).  It turned out that he liked
the whitewalls (that had been turned to the inside on the truck I
bought).  So he had them mounted whitewalls out and then installed
them as marked L&R, effectively running them backwards.

The question is:

Did I miss something along the way (and Honda)?  Is it now OK to run 
radial tires for a while one way and then run them backwards?  If not, 
this may be part of Ford's problem.  And a potential problem for any A/S 
owner that has radial tires and rotates them to the "other" side.

GQ '67 Safari