Proper tire pressure

[Airdale]

I don’t know about litigation in your country. In the USA it’s quite popular. Especially when a person does something that harms another or the other’s stuff. Even when we harm our own stuff our insurance carrier may balk at having to pay for something we did that was not within the established safety parameters.

My message is about staying within the established safety net. A lot of tire questions are about doing things the right way.

For our everyday vehicles there are well established tire industry standards for all of our replacement tire needs. Those standards are not tailored for trailer tire fitments. We are accustomed to going to our local tire retailer for replacement tires. Those establishments are not normally fully trained to assist with trailer tire replacements. We are not accustomed to asking our vehicle manufacturers for assistance and when we do they give answers not always acceptable to the trailer owner. However, the established tire industry standards for our everyday vehicle tires are the same for replacements on our RV trailers. It’s not complicated, here is a reference that once thoroughly studied provides all the guidance for successful replacement tire fitments with regular and plus sized fitments. Even though dated in 2006 it has all the changes mandated in the 2007 tire industry rules changes.

http://www.tiresafety.com/images/Tire%20Replacement%20Manual.pdf

It is not specific to just the manufacturer that published it. It contains tire industry standards established for all brands.

[Tonylmiller]

I used to be a Tire Engineer for Dunlop, and all my experience deals with passenger car radials (not trailer tires). However...

I do not see any reason to inflate tires above the maximum pressure unless they are overloaded. And they should never be overloaded, because that means your trailer is overloaded. If they are overloaded, you can overinflate a bit, but I would not go more than 20 psi over the stated maximum cold tire pressure. Remember that the pressure goes up anyway as the tire warms up running down the road.

Underinflation is the worst thing you can do to a tire. Underinflation causes heat generation, which will destroy the tire, especially at high speeds, high loads, and hot weather.

The reason why I say no need to overinflate is that the maximum loads are conservative. I don't know if we ever had a tire to fail the DOT load test in the 5 years I worked for Dunlop. We often ran them to failure in the high speed test, but the load test was essentially a legal formality. The tires never failed it.

However, I cannot speak to how things are done in China.