Directional Tires

Does anyone know if putting on a directional tread tire backwards will cause your truck to vibrate at high speeds.

 

I wanna see what people say about this. My buddy has an old jeep and somebody slashed one of his MTs so he put on the spare but the treads in the wrong direction

 

yeh thats what I thought too. Just got my truck back from the back from the body shop. They had to refinish my rims and must have pulled the tire off of the rim and installed it backwards. They also failed to tighten the lug nuts on both front tires

 

^ ouch. That doesn't give you much confidence in the other work they did.

 

the body work came out good. Just the tire issue so far/

 

they want vibrate if on backwards,the tread design is made to shed water to get better grip in the rain.

 

I know Goodyear Ultragrips (passenger cars tires) are directional which allows greater water dispersion due to the tread design. If the tires were put on backwards then the water would not be dispersed thus causing a loss of traction due to hydroplaning.

 

true

 

Bought a truck once, it had directional tires on it, which I didn't realize until I rotated them a couple times, I didn't get any vibration but every one of those tires had to be replaced due to tread separation. They were mostly wore out anyway, no big deal, but ever since I have paid more attention to whether tires were directional or not, seems like it was just way hard on the tires to run them in the opposite direction. Just my 1-time experience, might not even be anything to it.

 

I took it to the shop today and they are telling me they fixed the problem by reinstalling the tire the right way. I guess I will have to see tomorrow

 

Loose nuts can definitely give you some nasty vibration. If you drove far like that you're probably lucky and didn't turn much.

Not sure what effect a reversed directional tire would have besides screwing your wet traction, but it probably depends on the tread pattern and the condition of the surface you're running on.

 

Umm, this is a lil off topic. But can someone tell me if the cooper discoverer st's (not stt's) can go both way's?

 

Mounting a directional tire backwards will not cause a vibration or have more tire wear because of it. The purpose of directional tires/tread is to channel water between the tires' footprint and the road, decreasing the chance of hydroplaning. But, you can still hydroplane even if you have directional tires. I had directional tires on my civic and one was mounted backwards and didn't even know it until someone pointed it out to me.