Shopping at The Tire Retail – How to Get a Good Deal?

When you are shopping at the tire retail for new pair of tires, you will find out that there are numerous types and sizes of tires available. Buying the right tires for your purposes and requirements will ensure you the best deal which sometimes is not buying the cheapest tires available because they may cost you a lot afterwards.

            The best tires for your wheels must insure good grip between them and the road surface. This is the reason why manufacturers produce three different types for three different conditions of road surface. For clean road surface like summer time the tire itself insures the needed grip and then you will need summer tires which are the best for high speed performances. For snowy or icy road surface like deep winter snow, the grapple of the winter tire has many canals and that insures the needed grip. Also there is another solution – to buy all-season tires but they are good and mostly used for areas whit moderate temperatures where the winter is not that snowy because all-season tires will not perform as well as winter tires. The best practice is to use two pairs of tires – summer and winter ones and to change them at the beginning and at the end of the winter.

            After choosing the type of the tire, you need to find what size of tires you need to buy. If you want to buy bigger or smaller or the same tires as your current ones, you need to find one small label on them to find out what size they are. The label should look like this “P185/60 R15 92V” and it indicates several things. The first letter shows what vehicle must use that tire. For automobiles is “P”, “T” is for spare tires and “LT” is for light trucks. Then comes the tire width in millimeters and after it the height of the profile of the tire expressed as percent of the height. “R15” stands for radial type tire and 15 inches length of the inside diameter. The final digits and the letter are the load that single tire may carry and the maximum recommended speed for safe driving. In this case “V” is for speeds up to 240 km/h (149mph).

            Now you are ready to start choosing the tires that will fit your pocket. If you don’t have much money for that purpose then try changing only the tires on the wheels which the engine drives because that way you will receive the effect of the new car tires (interesting is that term in Norwegian is nye bildekk) but at cold weather with a lot of ice on the road the other wheels may lose grip with the surface.

            Another thing to look out for is the date of manufacturing because the rubber of the tires loses its capabilities as time passes even if they haven’t been used. That date is indicated on a DOT label which is followed by twelve digits. The last four of the twelve digits are showing the week and the year of manufacturing. Example: DOT XXXX XXXX 0810 = 08.2010.

For more info about car tires read here.