Before anybody buys a set, it is worth running a hand across the tread. Not looking at it, feeling it, backwards and forwards across the blocks. If it catches one way and glides the other, that is feathering, and it means the wheel is running at a slight angle to the direction it travels. Alignment, in other words, and a fresh set fitted over the top of it wears the same way within a few thousand miles.
The other pattern feels quite different. Cupping is a row of scalloped dips spaced evenly round the tyre, like shallow thumbprints, usually with a rumble that gets blamed on the tyres themselves. That is a damper no longer controlling the wheel, so it skips rather than staying down, and the tread wears in patches where it lands. New rubber does not cure that.
So the honest order is suspension and alignment first, tyres after. It is not what anybody wants to hear when a morning has been set aside for tyres, but fitting four onto a car that eats them is a way of buying the same problem twice.
Front tyres wear first, and hills and stop-start traffic make it worse. Anywhere with a lot of braking and turning, Westwood Hill included, chews the outer shoulders long before the middle of the tread goes. Same tools in Bell Green as in Forest Hill, same on every call. Valve in Sydenham, balance in Crystal Palace, pressures before we go.
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Constant climbing and braking on this ground works the suspension harder than level driving does, so tired dampers show up in the tread sooner here. Add the camber on the streets around Sydenham Road and the kerbing that goes with tight parking, and alignment drifts more often than it might elsewhere. Have all four read before committing to a set.
Both front tyres worn to a sharp edge on the inner shoulders with the outer halves barely marked, on a car whose alignment had never been checked. We fitted what it needed and told the owner where to take it next.
A driver near Mayow Park was convinced of a wheel bearing on the strength of a rumble at thirty. Both rear tyres were cupped right the way round. The dampers were long past working and the noise had been the tread landing unevenly.
A single tyre worn on one edge with the other three even. That is not alignment across the car, it is one corner, and it usually points at something bent rather than something out of adjustment. Worth finding before four new tyres went on.
Not to the standard a proper rig gives, and we would not pretend otherwise. What we can do is read the wear across all four tyres, which tells you whether it needs doing and roughly what is wrong. That is enough to decide the order.
Almost never. Cupping is a suspension symptom that happens to show up in rubber. A tyre wears where the car lets it, so the cure is at the damper rather than in the tread. Replacing tyres alone buys a quiet car for a few months.
Not really. Once the block edges have been worn into a ramp shape they stay that way, and the tyre stays noisy and down on wet grip even where there is depth left. It can serve out its life on the rear axle.
It is not urgent the way a puncture is, but it does not improve on its own. The noise grows, wet braking gets worse and the tyre is used up faster than it should be. Get the dampers looked at, then book the tyres.
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