I’m going to post a dissenting opinion about the cause of the failure.
First, it is really hard to diagnose tire failures from internet photos and forum descriptions. There are important clues that the average person would miss, plus there are things that are not important that are reported.
Kingsway reported bulging and deformation – a classic sign for a belt leaving belt separation. He reported the tire had 67K miles on them and were made in 2003. That’s plenty of miles and the tires are old but – as others have reported – not terribly old. It should also be mentioned that we are talking England here – mild climate.
There are cracks in the photo, but they only appear in the outermost rib. I’m sure some of that is due to the age of the tire, but because they only appear in that one area, it’s not a simple case of “too old”. It should also be noted that cracking is aggravated by bulges.
Now here is the other part: When tires are inflated, the cords in the tire are stressed (put in tension) and the greater the pressure, the greater the tension. There is also a material failure phenomenon called “Fatigue” – where the cyclic stresses will cause something to fail after many, many cycles that a single stress event won’t. In this case, 67K miles is over 60 million cycles – and that puts it in the realm of a fatigue failure. (Defect? Sorry, those would cause an early failure and never of this type.)
Conclusion: This is a classic fatigue type failure likely due to the combination of over-inflation and premature aging (source unknown) I have to agree with Kingsway – be careful with older tires (or tyres!)
CapriRacer
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