There are four digits in a small oval on the sidewall of every tyre on your car. The first two are a week, the last two are a year, and together they say when the tyre was built. It is the number nobody looks at, and on a well kept car covering modest mileage it is often the number that matters most, because rubber has a shelf life that has nothing to do with distance travelled.
Age hardening is a slow chemical change. The oils that keep the compound flexible migrate out, ultraviolet light and ozone attack the surface, and the rubber goes from pliable to brittle. You see it first as a network of fine cracks in the base of the tread grooves and along the sidewall, which is what people mean by perishing. A hard tyre still measures well on a depth gauge and still looks respectable, and it will grip well enough on a dry day to fool anybody. What it will not do is deform properly on cold wet tarmac, and what it can do is split under an impact a younger tyre would have absorbed.
Big alloys and low-profile tyres look good and break easily. We check both when we come out to Lordship or wherever the car is standing: the tyre for cuts, splits and bulges, and the alloy for damage, before anything goes back on. A Pixmore cul-de-sac or a Garden Square main road, tell us which. A tight terrace in Jackmans or a narrow bay on the A6 is usually workable.
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Garden city driving is gentle on tyres. Wide roads, short trips and unhurried traffic mean sets on the quieter roads through Grange and Lordship often reach old age with the tread hardly touched. That is precisely the case where the date code tells you more than the depth gauge does, and it is worth reading before winter rather than after the first hard frost.
A low mileage car on a Norton driveway had a set that had barely worn. Every date code came from the same distant week and the sidewalls were crazed top to bottom. Nothing measured wrong. Everything about the rubber was wrong.
An owner had spotted crazing on the sidewall and assumed it was cosmetic. The more telling cracks were down in the bottom of the tread grooves, where the flexing actually happens. We showed them with a torch and no persuading was needed.
The wheel in the boot well had full tread and a date code older than the last two owners of the car. It would have been reassuring and useless. Better to learn that on a driveway in Pixmore than on a hard shoulder at Junction 9.
There is no legal cut off for a car in normal use, so it is a judgement rather than a rule. We go on the condition of the rubber, the date code and how the car is kept. A garaged car ages its tyres far more slowly than one parked under trees.
In a small oval on the sidewall at the end of a longer code. Four digits, week then year. It is often moulded on one face of the tyre only, so if you cannot see it from outside, look at the inner face.
Depth separates the two cases. Surface crazing on a sidewall may well be cosmetic. Cracks reaching down into the groove base sit exactly where the tyre flexes hardest, and that is where a split begins.
It might, and that is the awkward part. The test looks for specific defects rather than measuring flexibility, so a hardened tyre with good tread can pass and still be the wrong thing to be driving on in December.
Then you keep your money. Coming out, reading the sidewalls properly and driving off again without fitting anything is part of the job rather than a wasted trip, and it happens more often than people expect.
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