On Fri, 31 Mar 2017 21:27:33 -0400, Meanie > wrote:

>> Whom do you buy your tires from online?
>
> Usually Costco, but not online.

What I love about Costo, for tires, is that they are the *cheapest* (by
far) for returning the old tires, where they're only one dollar plus sales
tax (which is a strange thing to pay a sales tax to *return* a tire for
recycling!).

They take *any* tire, so I've even cleaned up neighbor's back yards for
them, and hosed down the tires, and Costco took them at about $1.08 per
tire.

What I hate about Costco is that they only have a limited selection of
tires, where locally they only have Michelin & Bridgestone (and sometimes
Goodyear).

What I love about Costco is that everything is included in the $15 mounting
price, which includes mounting and balancing and valves and nitrogen and
even free rotations every 6K miles and road hazard repairs (within the life
of the tread, prorated if not fixable).

What I hate about Costco is that you have to get there a day before you
were born just to get in line and wait along with the rest of the world in
front of you (especially during their specials, one of which is going on at
this very moment, which is the $70 coupon for a set of 4 tires).

Their prices are just ok.

> What is the overall cost when you factor in the mounting and balance?

As mentioned above, Costco is $15 per tire for mounting and balancing, and
$1 per tire for recycling - but Costo will NOT mount and balance someone
else's tires.

Mounting and balancing prices vary hugely, but on average where I live,
mounting and dynamic balancing is anywhere between about $18 and $28 bucks
- so I can figure on about $20 per tire.

If you don't ask the right questions, you can pay a lot for a non
road-force balancing, but in my experience, expensive balancing is rarely
needed (although there's nothing wrong with road force balancing). What's
wrong is paying road-force balancing prices for standard dynamic balancing!


Nonetheless, as I noted in the first post, I do my own mounting and I sort
of do my own balancing, in that I have all the basic Harbor Freight
equipment
a. Bead breaker (which is has to be modified slightly to actually work)
b. Mounting tool (which has to be bolted down or you'll go nuts)
c. Static balancer (the hard part is finding the right shape weights)
d. Air compressor, hoses, fittings, valves, valve tools, patch tools, etc.

Of course, all that equipment cost me about three hundred bucks, which at
twenty bucks a tire, took the first 15 tires just to break even, but I'm
past that stage now.

While I fix a flat at home (patching from the inside when I'm not on the
road - otherwise I plug from the outside when I'm on the road), I mostly
just rotate the tires, roughly on the changes of seasons.

While I'm fully familiar with rotation patterns for unidirectional tires, I
still swap sides, except in the winter, where it rains out here. In the
winter, I make sure the tires go back on unidirectionally.

I'm also familiar with match mounting where I match mount the wheels to the
tires, given whatever markings (usually red or yellow dots, and sometimes
both) the manufacturer provides on the tires (where I look it up each time
since the meaning is general, but still manufacturer specific).

Every once in a while I get a vibration after mounting. Not much, but a
vibration nonetheless. I take the wheels off and move them, one by one to
the front left (drivers side) where the steering wheel feels it the most
(although, in practice, the front right is about the same sensitivity).

In a really bad case, I'd remount them but I've never had to do that yet.
Just moving the wheels from front to rear generally pinpoints the vibrating
tire.

For example, when I move a vibrating wheel & tire assembly to the rear, the
vibration drops dramatically, so it's pretty easy to isolate which tires
are statically balanced but not dynamically balanced.

What I've found, in practice, is that out of balance wheels is actually
rather rare, if they're nicely statically balanced.

Once in about every dozen mounts (or so) they're out of balance dynamically
even though they're perfect statically. I have OEM alloy wheels which, I
think, helps with the balance since steel wheels, I'm told, vary much more
than do the alloy wheels.

Given that a typical tire shop probably changes hundreds of tires a day,
that means that dozens of tires in a day are out of balance for them, so it
makes sense for THEM to dynamically balance EVERY wheel, but for someone
who takes his time at home to statically balance on decent wheels, my
experience is that very few wheels actually need dynamic balancing.

To answer your question, in practice, I only pay for mounting and balancing
on every dozenth wheel assembly or so. So all I pay for are the tires,
since most of the time I get free shipping (saving, for example, what Tire
Rack charges, which is generally around $15 to $18 per tire just for
shipping by UPS ground, with each tire being about 25 pounds).

In the end, the total out-of-pocket cost for me is just the cost of the
tires and the buck each for 1-1/2-inch valves and the cost of the stick-on
weights (about fifty cents per wheel roughly).

Including all those costs, my latest set of ultra high performance (UHP)
tires cost $70 each, which nets me directional all-season tires with a
reasonably low profile and straight-line wet traction on asphalt greater
than 0.54g, straight-line wet traction on concrete greater than 0.38g.

The curb weight of my sedan is 3500 pounds, and the OEM tires were load
range 95 (6,084 pounds), while these new tires are 99 (6,836 pounds), which
is more than enough for a safety factor (at the standard max of 42psi).

The OEM tires were speed index H (130mph) wherease these new tires are
speed index V (149mph), which again indicates a better tire over the OEM.
The speed index is really a temperature index, where these tires are UTQG
rated at temperature A (over 115mph), which is as good as the UTQG gets.

Likewise, the UTQG for traction is AA which is as good as UTQG gets, and
the friction coefficient on my new tires is 0.89 based on a calculation off
the treadwear (u = 2.25/Treadwear**0.15).

That treadwear is 5 times that of the standard government uniroyal test
tire in the Texas tests by the manufacturer. The manufacturer is allowed to
underrate that number, but they're not allowed to overrate it, so, it's a
believable number, although it never directly correlates to miles because
the conditions in the real world differ greatly from the test conditions.

While someone said I was cheated by paying about $70 all included for each
tire, I think I got a pretty good deal, although I just looked and realized
I could have saved a few bucks had I ordered from a different online web
site (tires-easy.com) but I don't know what their shipping costs would have
been.