Tire rotation...what's the deal
 

All,
I keep hearing people talking about rotating tires to minimize wear, etc., but I have a serious question about this. The stock RE040's are directional tires, right (thus the big arrow on the sidewall)? So since you can't swap front to rear because of the staggered setup, your only option is to swap side-to-side. But really, you can't do this either because if you do, the tires would be rotating the wrong direction (i.e. backwards).

Are the tires directional because of tread pattern or construction? If it's construction, then I would imaging that the tire is built to handle rotational load in a specific direction. What's the effect of making the tire spin backwards?

Curious...........

I believe the only rotation you can do is side to side, front and rear, which means you would have to dismount and remount the tires.

I do not think the tires would be adversely affected by running them "backwards', but the tread design is unidirectional, so you would loose alot of the handling and water evacuation benefits, especially in the rain.

Ohhhhhhh, so there is no "inside sidewall" or "outside sidewall"? Didn't know that....

Man, having to remount the tires to rotate them sounds like a major PITA. Hope mine don't start feathering.

Thanks for the education.

Right,I just didn't realize that you had to dismount the tire from the wheel to do a rotation....like I said...What a PITA!!!

I'm pretty sure our Z's owner's manual says never to rotate our tires.

Oh sure....bring THAT up! Who RTFM? :D

You say that like you expect something about these tires not to be a pain in the @ss.

he he he.....Ok, you got me there...

You can rotate the fronts L to R, R to L. You must take them off the rims. The tires must remain turning the direction of the arrow.

I actually just had my tires cross rotated because of early signs of feathering. I went to Performance Nissan and they cross-rotated, balanced and aligned the same day free of charge. No more road noise for now, but I was warned that these tires were horrible and I shouldn't expect them to last that much longer. My rims weren't scratched in the process and overall it was a pretty painless process. Find a good dealership and this whole tire feathering issue wont be as big a problem as you think it will be. Especially now that we are entitled to free front tires for up to 24K miles!!!!

I thought you couldn't rotate those tires since the back ones are wider than the front ones.

You're right, the staggered setup means that you can't swap front and rear. Thus, it's a left to right swap. The catch (as I've just learned) is that since they're directional tires, you have to take the tires off the wheels and remount them so that the outside sidewall before the swap will be the inside sidewall after the swap. If you just pull the wheels off the car and swap left and right, they'll be rotating the wrong way. Bad mojo in my book.

So why do you even have to rotate them If you're just goin to switch them from left to right and right to left? Isn't the point to extend the tire life by equalizing tire wear? Because the front tires wear out faster from breaking, so it'd only make sense to rotate from front to back and back to front. One thing I was thinkin about doing is that after the front tire is almost all worn out and the rear tires are still okay, I can probably use the rear tires up by doin some burn outs...:D

well in a sports car, there is always a certain amount of camber, and since most of us run in straight lines 98% of the time, this camber causes the inside edge to wear out.

swap sides and you swap the inside edge.

you wont get the same kind of life a normal swap would yeild. remounting the tires though, is the only way to swap the inside edge. even if they were all the same size, and non directional, swap them front to back, side to side, cross. the inside edge is always the inside edge. and on our cars, that will wear out way before the rest of the tire.