John Struthers

We were tinkering with Zack's 81' fuel pump issue when one of his food and coke mooching, wrench head buddies pointed out something painfully obvious.
In between munching KC Extra Crisp and guzzling quarts of carbonated beverages he mumbles to another gorging hungry/thirsty motorhead...
Hey Dude! This tire is mounted ...like all wrong. aside, me: Huh?
Hey man this ones on wrong, too. aside, me: WTF!
This went on till it was pointed out to the old fart (that's me) that the rotational arrows were all pointing in the wrong direction.
Of course before they even looked at the sidewalls they had merely looked at the tread pattern to discern something was wrong -little smart-asses-.
Thank you Discount Tire for opening a ***** in my armor for these crumb snatching, nose pickers to attack.
Believe it or not on occasion I have been known to push those 35mph cloverleafs' to much better than double the posted speed - hey, the only thing I can hit is guardrail, T rail, or grass , and they are the only curves in Midland - and I noticed that after my last set of Kumoho's were installed I was reaching traction limits extremely early in the numbers on the speedometer device.
Check your tires! Being humbled by 16/17 year olds is a cold plate of Crow, indeed.
BTW
When was the last time anyone bought a 16 piece dinner with the obligatory 4 sides from the Colonel?
Prepare for sticker shock.

Bill Ball

I used the local tire shop to install my Tirerack dropshipped tires. They managed to get the small ones on the rear rims and big ones on the front rims on my 89.

John Struthers

We are not alone.
Crap! I check my tire pressure three times a week and didn't catch this.

touque

Bill - I had a similar thing happen to me last year but worse. Took my car to Discount Tire to buy 4 new tires. Well, when I got the car back, it kept pulling to the left. Seeing that the reason I had to get new tires is that I hit a pothole and ruptured both sidewalls of the passenger side tires, I thought the car kept pulling to the left because of the pothole hit.

I take the car to get it aligned at a shop much further away and no matter what they do, they can't keep the car from pulling left and they insist the alighment is perfect - double, even triple-checked.

When I got the car home, I was looking it from the back and noticed that something was strange. That the left tire looked different than the right? What? Upon looking at the sidewalls, they put a 255/40/17 on the right rear (correct) but 255/45/17 on the left.

Nothing like not needing an alighment but getting one because the tire guys screwed up... I never even thought to look at the sizes because 'they wouldn't put the wrong sizes on would they?'...

IcemanG17

For S4 and later cars.....at least some tire shops get some things right...how about this...correct tires on front and rear, but both rear rims on the left side (front and rear) with both front rims on the right side!!!

ew928

NYC shop mounted 4 directional tires.
Got left rear mounted backwards on the S4.
At least I made it easy for them and got 4 same sized tires.

Ernest (NYC)

John Struthers

I know I should be sorry for starting this post...(grovel, grovel...)
And really, I felt like a dolt. Not to mention slightly used -again- by a vendor.
But now I am shamelessly gigglin' and chucklin' .
If the replies were made up they are a hoot. If not that explains my tears of mirth.

Bill Ball

What? You should have blamed it on the tire shop!

Daniel Dudley

When you consider how much a service tech. makes an hour, It really isn't too hard to figure out what the problem is. And thank you for posting ! My S4 went into a shop recently with 36 psi all around. They plugged one tire and it came out with 40 PSI rear, 28 and 36 front. Talk about a little understeer ! I will be checking the tires with the oil from now on.

Ed Scherer

OK, John, you got me to go check my tires. I was 99.9% sure all was A-OK.

1. Left Front, looks OK; arrow is going the correct way. (Also noticed that inner shoulder was looking a little more worn than the rest, but not bad).
2. Left Rear, looks OK; arrow is going the correct way.
3. Right Rear, looks OK; arrow is going the correct way.
4. Right Front, looks OK; arrow is going the correct way. But...

I knew that I had an alignment issue on the right front, but my recent 1500 mile drive to, in, and from the mountains seems to have revealed a little more of a problem than I thought:



Something doesn't look quite right, but I can't put my finger on it. Perhaps I should have dealt with this a little sooner, ya' think?

BTW, this might be a good "scare 'em with a photo" for convincing people of the importance of good alignments, not lifting the car before an alignment, etc. (although this particular case wasn't due to lifting before the alignment; my last set of front tires wore very evenly).

Jim_H

Us PNW guys had a track day 2 weeks ago. I had some extra Toyos I had sitting around mounted for the event. They asked me what psi I ran and I told them around 42 back and 35 front.
I never pushed my car real hard at the track the following week end but didn't like the way it cornered at all. Anyhoo for various reasons I never got around to checking my pressure till the following day, 42 psi in the front, 34 in the back

Drewster67

This last weekend ............