How to Diagnose Irregular Tire Wear

Monitoring your tires' tread patterns is an essential part of keeping your automobile safe. Reading the wear patterns on your tires is a lot easier if you're familiar with the different kinds of wear. Knowing what to look for helps you spot irregular tread patterns, which in turn gets you car into a shop and safely back onto the road in as little time as possible.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

1. Check your tires for undulating cups or scallops along the outside edges. These usually appear when one of your car's suspension parts are worn or bent.
2. Run your fingers across the tire's surface and see if the ridges have one sharp edge and one smooth edge. This is called "feathering" and indicates a toe-in problem with your car.
3. Look for second-rib wear. If the second rings of your radial tires are noticeably more worn than the others, then your tires may be too big for your wheels.
4. Watch the tires for one-sided wear. When one of a tire's sides is lower than the other, your wheel alignment's off and needs to be fixed.
5. Keep your tires inflated to their manufacturer-recommended air pressures. Improperly inflated tires often develop wear patterns that cause dangerous tread erosion and can lead to blowouts.

Tips & Warnings

• When in doubt, take your car into a shop and have a specialist check out your tires.
• Monitor your tire pressure once a week to catch any slow-draining leaks before they cause permanent damage.