Hot Rods There’s trailer tires on my project

When I worked at the Firestone store in Waco Tx in the early 70's we would get tires in that were branded unsafe for highway use to sell to the cotton farmers for their cotton trailers. Those tires sold for under ten bucks new and More than one of those guys from around the town of West Texas (West Station to central Texas folk) had them on his pickup driving on the highway.
All of my trailers have radials and I haven't looked on the boat trailer to see if the tires that may be original to the trailer are dot marked or not. I'm thinking that they are 8 ply rated as that is a pretty heavy boat.

On the trailer tires on a car it might be more rough ride and possibly traction issues as the two factors that you might worry about. That and liability if the tire causes an accident.

As for bias tires wearing out trailer or otherwise, we only got 25K out of the real good bias tires in most cases. You got better mileage out of a set of Vogue bias tires but those things were stiff and heavy as I mounted a lot of them in the 70's.

 

No, it was a 14.5 on a 15 wheel....I still don't know how they stretched it enough to get it on, those tires are stiff!

 

On the Airstream trailer forum, they go just the opposite. They recommend running LT light truck tires on the Airstream trailers. Thats what I have on mine.

 

One thing worth mentioning is that the speed rating of most ST tires is 65 mph. Before I found that out I towed my trailer at whatever the speed limit was... sometimes 80 mph. I had several tires blow due to separation. No flats in many thousand miles since I capped my speed at 65.

 

Can anyone add any pictures of trailer tires on highboy hotrods, please?

 

The 14.5" tires had to be mounted on 14.5" wheels, the 14.5" tires won't go on to 15" wheels (the tire hole is too small), and are too big for the 14" wheels to even stay on the wheel. The 14.5 wheels don't allow 14" tires (are too small to fit onto the wheel) or 15" tires (are too big to stay on the wheel). Back when the trailer I was borrowing, the 14.5" wheels it had were 8 studs & lug nuts.

When the 14.5 tires became hard to come by, I simply switched to 8 lug truck wheels and ran the 8 lug 15" truck wheels.

I have heard and seen those 14.5" wheels that were also made with a large 5 bolt lug pattern (with either a 5" or a 5.5" bolt circle, don't remember which), and also the wide 5 pattern used on the old Fords for a while.

I mounted thousands of tires in my youth, when I worked at the gas station.