well at 70 mph the plymouth is runnin 3200 rpm i have 14" bias play tires in the back with a 3:73 gear and a turbo 350 but i have a set of radial www in a 15" thats about 3" taller ... is mixing these dangerous? or should i spend the 200 bucks on another pair of bias? by the way cant see the rear tires cause of the skirts...
i have g78s on the front and 195/70r14 on the rear of my 50 i had to do that so the car would sit on the ground. and after driving the car for a year with all biasplys i would say the radials screwed it up a bit. she pulls worse now on shitty roads but other then that its fine. throw the tires on for a little bit and see how you like it. ive put over 4000 miles on my car that way just took some gettiing used to.
DirtyT I would have to say that its not the radials screwing with you unless they are just about worn out. Just my .02 Radials are good followers but not good leaders. Its fine to run radials on the back and bias plys on the front but not the other way around. The problem is that when your bias plys catch a groove and follow it so will the radials. I've run 'em radial rears and bias fronts and never had a problem. They used to recommend that if you had to mix 'em never put the radials on the front. Now there is a down side to radials that is that they are normally worn out long before the tread is gone. You can still ride and drive 'em but your ride will get real crappy almost like you need to see to the suspension. Throw a new set on and its back to normal.
I guess I agree with P&Bner. Until last year I ran Hurst slicks on the rear and Bias up front, the Hurst tires were recapped radials, no problems at all fast or slow, put on about 10K on those before running the current bias all around. Rains alot in New York.
I've noticed the opposite, radials on back/bias front makes a car handle wierd, but radials front/bias rear is ok. I guess it depends on the car and the tires. Whatever....mixing them in certain ways can be "exciting", whether or not it's "dangerous" depends on your driving skill.
When I was a kid, I bought an old biscayne from some guy.It had bias ply on the front and radials on the rear.That car handled great that way, I could drive through anything(winter in Wyoming).Never had any problems with the way it drove, until I put radials on the front.
me, personally, would rather run old bias plys then radials... my old school bias' run GREAT, and are from the 60s... got another pair now for the rear of my rod im buildin, so when tahts done, we;ll see.. and by the way, yes, will be bias plys in front too, LOL... lil ones....
I'm with squirrel, but will add that there are a lot of factors involved and a blanket statement like never mix bias and radials can have exceptions. my old coupe never rode better with the 10" Radirs on the back than it did with the little Michelins on the front the skinny radials in front with an over powered, nose heavy car with big bias slicks on the back just worked
When I bought my '60 Pontiac in 1995 it had General radials up front and some old bias-ply snows on the back. I drove it home about 80 miles and every time I hit a seam on the interstate the rearend would follow it and jump around and I could just see if it got wet that leading into a skid. I drove it for a while that way, though, until I ran over something and killed one of them - the spare was as bald as Kojak (the original one). I never actually lost control, but it was very uncomfortable. So I went to a tire place and the guy wouldn't sell me just two tires for the back. The fronts were an odd size and he didn't have anything in stock to match them. So he claimed it was dangerous to mix tire sizes on the same car. What he really meant was "I get a bigger comission if you buy 4 tires".... so I said screw this, there's plenty of hot rods with back tires way bigger than front, one or two sizes won't make a difference. I went home and pulled a couple of 235/75R15 uniroyals that came on a '79 Buick I had, and stuck them on dry rot cracks low tread and all. Handling was fine after that, in fact it's one of the best handling cars I ever drove, manual steering and all - I could power through corners at high speeds that my parents '84 Buick would be leaning so bad it felt like it was going to flip over. So I would avoid mixing them on the same car, but if thats what you needed to do to get the look, may as well drive it and see if there's any trouble. I'm still debating what I want to run on this '50, it needs a set of tires pretty bad.
Don't most of the early Pro-Street cars have radials on the front with the "big meat" bias on the rear. I had a Pro-Streeted 40 Ford sedan for a couple of years and drove it several thousand miles like that with no problems. The car was very stable and drove excellent. Perhaps I was just lucky...
I had radials up front and bias ply's in the back of my Charger. Talk about white knuckles. The front tires would stay planted all the time, if I hit a bump whille turning the rear end would seem to hop around and slide real easy. Sometimes no bump was required. And if I did hit a bump the damn car wouldn't stop bouncing in the rear. Like a 400 lb gorrilla on speed was jumping in my trunk. The shocks were fine. I was so freaking broke at the time I had to borrow ten bucks so I could have the bias plys I found digging through my garage mounted on my wheels. I'll never do it again.
The Jalopy Journal
