Everyday we travel down the freeway at high speeds trusting our lives to pieces of rubber. This rubber is more commonly known as tires.
Tires have a very important task, and they are not nearly as simple as they look. The most common kind of tire that the general population uses is called the radial tire.
The first step in making a tire is to collect the raw materials. There is a long list of these materials and the list varies from manufacturer to manufacturer.
This list may include various types of natural and synthetic raw rubber, various chemicals pigments, wire, and special fabrics, antioxidants, oils, carbon black and many other additives. Some manufacturers uses as many as 30 different kinds of rubber in their tires.
When all of these things are collected they are thrown together into a Banbury machine. The Banbury machine mixes them together.
The blenders within this machine heat the materials to a very high temperature and implement a very high pressure on them. This process helps the materials be mixed together well.
Then the mixture is placed in a machine that rolls it out. Then, it is mashed up and rolled out again to help make sure all the ingredients are mixed together.
This process is repeated over and over. After this, the mixture will be formed into sidewalls, treads and other parts of the tire.
The interior of the tire is built first on an appropriately named tire building machine. The first part of the interior is called a bead or bead bundle.
The bead is length of rubber coated steel cable that is shaped like a hoop. The bead it the part that sits next to the wheel rim when the tire is done.
The bead is vital because it is the part that gives the tire enough strength to stay on the wheel rim when the car is moving. It is also the part that handles the stress of heavy forces from tire mounting machines when the tires are being put onto your car.
The main part of the tire is called the plies. The plies are made up of the textile fabrics layered that allow flexibility, but are very strong.
The strength of a tire is calculated by the number of layers of plies that it has. A normal car may have 2 plies while an airplane may have 30 plies.
Cap plies are specialized plies for high-performance tires. They are not usually included in an everyday radial.
For people with rough road conditions, steel belted radial tires are an option. These tires feature a strip of steel along the inside of the tire to help it keep from getting punctured.
Tread is a very important part of the tire. It is the visible, textured rubber part on the outside of a tire.
Tread allows the car to have control of where it goes because of the traction that it provides. The texturing is specifically engineered to provide the best performance possible in a tire.
Snow tires will have a different tread than normal tires because of icy conditions. High performance tires also have different treads from everyday tires.
After this the tire is cured in the curing press. This press presses the tire into its final shape, creates the tread, and vulcanizes the rubber.
Following this the tire has to pass inspection by both humans and specialized machines. A few tires have to pass x-ray examinations of their interiors.
A few tires are even selected for durability tests in which they are ripped apart to see how much force they can withstand. Inspection is vital to provide the safety that we take for granted every day.
Tires are a relatively new invention. The radial tires that we know today were not invented until 1946.
This was a very important invention and one we use daily. Today, tires are complex and vital to living a normal life.
Author Resource:
Jack R. Landry has worked in the automotive industry for the last 16 years and written hundreds of articles about automobiles and auto repair Orem Utah . He had his own body shop for 12 years.
Contact Info:
Jack R. Landry
JackRLandry@gmail.com
http://www.CertifiedTireUtah.com
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