How often do you rotate your tires on your dually ("dooley" as some people call it) and what pattern??

Do you include your spare when rotating?

Seems like people have all types suggestions: Some say don't rotate them at all, just keep buying 2 new front tires each time. Some tire dealers say rotate all 6 or 7 every 5,000 miles. Some say every 10,000 miles.

I have decided to rotate all 7 (includes spare) every 6,000 miles. I put front tires on inside rear, take one inside rear and remount as spare, move outside rear to front- it gets sorta confusing...

 

Every 5k for me, I just swap inner for outer on the rear.

 

I do not own a dually, but I do work at a retail tire store. Personally, I'd leave the spare out of the equation*period. I agree with the 5,000 mile interval....that's just right and you can catch and correct any uneven tire wear with that frequency of rotation. The easiest way is to swap the inner rears to the fronts each time, leaving the outside rears as outside rears each time. If you're **** about the rotation direction, you could also alternate the above rotation as follows...rotate the fronts to the outside rears...the LF would go to the right outside rear, the RF would go the left outside rear, except the left outside rear would need to got to the RF and the right outside rear would then go the LF (consider it an X-pattern with fronts and outside rears would be the easiest way to understand it). The plot thickens if you are utilizing white letter tires and / or if the tires are assymetrical, too.
Hope I didn't add any confusion.
Greg

 

Keep in mind that some dual wheel trucks have direction and left/right side tires. To make it worse there are white letteres on one side and not the other side.

James

 

Hmmm, I was told to keep tires together on the rear. Example: fronts to one side of the rear, rear to the front. Next time, fronts go to the other side of the rear. That way each rear set is a matched set (hopefully unless the front end got really screwed up).

 

Good posts. I think I'm keeping up. Tell me on a dually, why does the inside tire wear at a different rate than the outside one on the same axle? I can only guess that during sharp turns they turn at different ratios causing the inside one to spin off more of the rubber?

 

I believe inside wears out faster because closer to spring mount on carrys more load due to slight flex in axle. i have not noticed this on mine, rotating tires on mine i have not figured out a good way yet because i have alcoa wheels and can only go front to outside rear. been thinking about 2 more wheels, longer studs, and having rear hubs machined and put on a sleeve that would allow both wheels to ride on hub.

 

The crown of the road chews the inside edge (closest to the center of the truck) of the inner tires up. If you just leave the tires where they are, the inners will wear out long before the outers. As you said, there's also some scrubbing in turns.

 

never gave that a thought sound like i thought wrong.