Digital Tread Depth Gauge

[BobbyP]

Lately I've been on a tire kick, adding the TPMS last month. This month I bought a Digital Tire Tread Depth Gauge. It's impressive. It displays in mm, inches in decimal, and inches in fraction nomenclatures. It's very well constructed. ~$26 from Amazon. It's a Storm 3S401.



My front tires measured 11/64" and my rear measured 7/32". Typically they require a minimum of 1/16". I'm going to rotate my tires soon and continue monitoring them. My tires have around 16k miles on them.

I'm a firm believer in NOT cross rotating tires. I keep them on the same side of the car. I had one set of tires on my SC that developed a belt problem after a cross rotation. I've since kept my tire rotations on the same side of the car.

[kevo420]

i never used to cross rotate tires either because i used to work with old-school mechanics that still believed in memory effect and such.. I've done it a couple times with with the vue with no problems

Where your tires directional?

Tire manufacturers still recommend cross-rotation for non directional tires.

[BobbyP]

My NITTO NTRD1 tires are not directional, but they have a defined outer wall with a red stripe. They're 255/45-ZR18's.

They've been good tires. A little wider than the stock Bridgestone Turanzas. I will never drive in snow, so tire width is not a factor...

My VUE is getting old... It just turned over to 22k miles yesterday...

[pdough]

I cross rotated the original Duellers to get 60+K and also on the subsequent set of Duellers for the same. Am doing the same on the current Kumhos and am getting near exact mileage with no problems.

My guess is that you had a bad set. But, I don't believe you'll see that big a difference in not cross rotating if your alignment is true. Its also a hell of a lot easier to jack one side up at a time to rotate front to back only, if you do it your self.