what actually is tire feathering???

 

Heel toe feathering is the equivalent of pigeon toed shoes [toed in] on humans.

The tread blocks being deep, squirm from the offset of forces [nonperpendicularity] due to high caster and camber exceeding the -0.5 degree design limit of tires. Errors in toe add to the problem but these show up as left/right vs a fore/aft angle.

Shows up much more with directional tires since they are rarely demounted and flipped to rotate...............to reverse scrub the angled block away.

Once the individual blocks become angled the slot [the void between blocks] is mistuned for noise cancellation.

Sipes in blocks stress relieve the block, unfortunately ultra performance tires have minimal siping.

A problem know since early 90's when directional tires came on the scene to improve brand new tire wet performance at the expense of mid to end life wet performance. Worn directionals are often worse than equally worn non directionals after 10,000 miles.

Try a non directional like PS2 to get away from many of these problems.

 

Besides these 473 posts, this is the first I have heard about it.