There was a little discussion in the Club Bar about a member who had to stop on the motorway only to find one trailer tyre virtually scrubbed away. It turned out that the tyre was a fractionally different size to the original on the other side and basically the trailer had sort of crabbed all the way down the M4 and scrubbed one tyre smooth.
Wind the clock forward to Flying Fifteen trailers. Jeremy kindly just bought 4011 from me, which has been resident at the club and not towed much for ten years including lock-down. When he checked the inner faces of the road wheels, which I had never done(!), he found the tyres looked cracked and not at all healthy. I’ve no idea why a life of weekly Thames water dips ands short drives from the ramp to the boat park would cause that! So replacements were in order.
Being of sound mind, Jeremy thought to replace the entire wheels and tyres. When they arrived and were fitted, Jeremy somehow noticed that they were very slightly different in size to the (unused!) spare wheel. So presumably if he ever needed to call the spare into duty, one or other tyre would then have scrubbed smooth. He managed to get a new matching tyre for the spare wheel.
Trying to think what the key learnings are:-
- check the tyre dimensions carefully before replacement. Not all FF trailer wheels are the same!!
- if you’re going to do complete replacements, consider getting three wheels at a time.
The Flying Fifteen Blog 
Interesting as always Richard. I had an experience where a trailer tyre deformed whilst towing. My tyre man told me all tyres have a date life ex of about 5 – 7 years (I think). Car tyres never reach the life ex as they will wear out in that time. trailer tyres do. Most caravan blowouts happen because of tyre life ex being exceeded. I wrote an article on this some time ago, I’m not sure if I style have the pictures of the deformed tyre and how to locate the date.
K
Hon Sec