How To Rotate Your Tires | TreadWright

Guide To Rotating Tires:

Tires are easily the most important thing on your car. Have you ever tried to drive without them? Exactly.

Looking for your tires is simple and will keep costs down in the long run. One of the easiest and most affordable things you can do to ensure tire longevity is rotating your tires.

With some simple tools, you can rotate your tires yourself, or just head down to a local tire shop to have them rotated at a minimal cost.

The most significant advantage of rotating your tires is to make sure that the tread is wearing down evenly across all tires. Different parts of a car wear down at different rates, so rotating tires across different wheels ensure that all tires are doing the same amount of work and wearing down evenly. It prevents uneven wear and can help prevent your tires from going out of balance.

You have to remember that different tires have different jobs on your vehicle and will wear down accordingly. The front two are for steering and/or drive tires, and the rear is either drive tires or trailing tires. By keeping the tire wear even on all tires, they’ll last longer, and you’ll have to replace them less often.

Rotation frequency depends a lot on how often you use your car and what type of driving you do. Many manufacturers recommend rotating tires after 7,500 miles or every six months. However, it is best to check the policy of your manufacturer and tire shop. If you’re covering more distance than usual, you can rotate your tires more often.

Traditionally, rotating tires used to be pretty straightforward. But modern tires feature a range of patterns and can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. This means that tire rotation can be more complex, but as long you go to a tire shop that knows what it is doing, rotating your tires is still cheap and easy to get done.

Here Are Some Simple Methods of Rotating Tires:

The Forward Cross Tire Rotation

This is used when the car is front wheel drive and is running asymmetrical tread pattern. In a forward cross, the front two tires are swapped to the back (front right to rear right and front left to rear left) while the back two tires are opposite locations on the front (rear right to front left, rear left to front right).

The Cross Pattern Tire Rotation

This is for asymmetrical tread patterns. All tires are swapped to opposite corners (front right to rear left and vice versa. Front left to rear right and vice versa).

The Rear Cross Tire Rotation

Used for 4x4’s or rear wheel drive vehicles that are running asymmetrical tires. The rear tires are swapped to the front (rear left to front left and rear right to front right), and the front tires are swapped to opposite locations on the rear (front left to rear right and front right to rear left).

Different Width Tire Rotation