You have to replace your agricultural tyres regularly as a result of wear, and this major investment will obviously be less painful if it occurs less often. As wear is the key on which the tyre replacement depends, the best thing would be to slow it down by defining what has the greatest impact on this wear and what levers could be acted upon to slow it down as much as possible. So yes, there are many causes of wear, but certain are more frequent than others and sometimes more rapid.
There are many causes of tractor tyre wear, certain of which can damage your agricultural tyres rapidly, irrespective of your user habits and mechanical settings.
No matter what the configuration of your farm is, you will use your tractor on very different types of ground: the court farmyard, the tracks you drive on, the road trips you make each day or the land in your fields, each of these surfaces can have a negative impact on tyre wear.
The type of soil and quality of the earth on your farm is likely to have a greater impact if you work with field crops. Earth is effectively more or less abrasive depending on your region:
A tractor tyre, by nature, is not meant for use on the road. Yet it seems that agricultural tractors spend more and more time on the road, particularly due to the distance between fields. If you cover many kilometres on the road each week with your tractor, your tyres’ lifespan is likely to be reduced rapidly.
Road surfacing is much harder than earth and its components make it abrasive like sandpaper. It contains highly aggressive materials: tar, crushed rocks and gravel which form a sprinkling of rough, sharp surface irregularities. The tips of the lugs crush into the minuscule abrasive fragments in the ground (indentation) rubbing away tiny particles of rubber during movement, in order to grip the ground. Driving for several hours on the road will inevitably lead to more rapid wear to your tractor tyres.
Tractor tyre wear is not a fatality or just a matter of product brand, but a factor over which you can have a major influence, leading to considerable savings for your farm.
Here are the factors that you can control or modify to gain several thousand hours more use of your tyres.
The use of a car tyre is basically always the same for most drivers: driving at a controlled speed, almost 100% on asphalt.
This use, common to almost all cars, leads to an incorrect perception of the use of agricultural tyres, which is much more technical and very different depending on the purpose intended by the tyre manufacturer.
Each agricultural activity requires tools that are adapted, so that the work can be done in the best possible conditions and this is exactly the same for an agricultural tyre.
For work in the fields, tyres are designed with a structure and rubber that is supple, to work on soft soil. They are perfectly suitable for field crop farming, but much less so for various manoeuvres in the farm courtyard where the ground is very hard. Whether you work with a tractor equipped with a front loader or telescopic arm, you must use suitable tyres which guarantee more resistance and better stability. They must be able to withstand the strain of frequent on-the-spot manoeuvres, with heavy loads, which are transferred to the tractor’s front axle.
If you drive a lot on the road, if you work frequently in the farm courtyard or in buildings, you must have more resistant tyres to avoid them wearing too rapidly.
These days there are agricultural tyres designed specifically for each use:
Of the principal causes of wear to agricultural tyres, mechanical faults are among the most frequent, particularly those linked to geometry:
Parallelism corresponds to the left/right alignment of the wheels relative to each other. Ideally, your tyres should be perfectly parallel to the vehicle’s centreline.
There are two types of problem with parallelism:
As opposed to parallelism, camber is the tilt of the top of the wheel inward or outward in relation to the true vertical. For this setting to be perfect, your tyre should be completely vertical, which is to say as flat as possible on the ground.
There are two types of problem with camber:
Lead/lag is the synchronisation of the front and rear axle of the tractor based on tyre size. A correct lead setting must result in slightly more front traction than at the rear. If the front tyres wear more rapidly than the rear tyres, there is a good chance you have a problem with the lead ratio.
Tyre wear may be caused by an incorrect pressure setting for your load:
Tyre wear is directly affected by speed, and drivers tend not to respect the speed recommended for the load and pressure settings adopted when the tractor is stationary, before the start of operations.
No, we cannot really classify causes of wear by order of importance, because generally they are all combined and it depends essentially on your type of farm: field crops, wine growing, polycropping/livestock farming…. etc. or your daily use which may differ considerably depending on your farming profile.
On the other hand, you can avoid or reduce the causes of tyre wear which correspond to you in the list above and above all choose tyres that are more suitable, and wear resistant, if you have a more heavy use of your equipment.
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