We now have brand new Hercules tires. We were in northern Minnesota when the rig picked up a vibration. I thought the front driver side tire was flat, low or loose. John checked it and all seemed well. Then it got bad with major shaking so we hunted an alignment shop in Bemidji and found Sadek's, who could fit us in two days hence. They weren't sure we were big enough to fit their racks so we stopped by so they could look. We explained the problem and he said bad alignment doesn't cause the shaking, worn tires do. Bad alignment causes worn tires. He came out to the rig, took one look at our original Michelin tires (30k miles on them) and he said they were crap. We had small cracks on the sides and tread was decent on all but the front. Those had developed an abnormal wear pattern with an inside strip wearing down. He recommended new tires and since we were planning to replace them when we took Chloe back to Maryland next month, we agreed. The Hercules reviews looked really good and he had the local fire truck, ambulance, school bus and lots off commercial trucks on his lot for service so we figured he had to do decent work so we ordered the tires.
We rolled out about 40 miles on decent paved roads to our campsite, parked the rig and played for a few days using the Subaru for transport. On the scheduled day, we headed in for new tires... And blew the outer passenger rear tire 25 miles from the shop. Arrrrgggh!! So very close. Sadek' s sent their service truck, put on the spare and we were at the shop in a bit over an hour and a half. The entire tread took off to places unknown and did a bit of damage along the way so we'll be getting one panel and some trim repaired and repainted. It could have been a lot worse.
A few notes:
1) John said getting the rig to the side of the road wasn't bad. There was no major wrenching of the rig when she blew. I'm not sure he realized the loud bang was the tire going. He thought the subsequent thump thump thump was the rumble strip. I was yelling to pull over, we blew a tire. It was luckily the outer dually. We figure it would have been much worse if it was the front. We didn't add any extra sway bars or other suspension improvements.
2) We have had moisture in the wide rear bin. This bin is connected to the spare tire bin. Our bolts were rusted. They got the tire off with effort. I plan to pull that tire again, clean off the rust and coat it all with Vaseline so we can get it off ourselves of needed.
3) We spent three weeks in northern Minnesota with bad-to-no phone service. We traveled many roads with no other cars or houses for miles. We were seriously lucky on many accounts. We found what seemed to be the perfect repair shop, we had phone signal when we needed it, we safely got off the road, and our guy had a service truck ready to roll. On the downside, John only gave the repair shop the truck key. He then lost the entire rest off the key ring while in Bemidji waiting for new tires to go on. My duplicate ring was in the rig so we'll be getting a whole bunch of keys made.
