Motorhome Load Ratings

Caravan Tyres Ageing- Second –hand caravan owners should check their tyres before a journey.

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Caravan Tyres Ageing

Caravan Tyres Ageing

Caravan Tyres Ageing

This advice also stretches to people who buy second-hand motorhomes. When you buy your shiny caravan or motorhome. One of the first things to do before you set off from the dealers is to check your tyres.

The dealers will have made the vehicle look like it is sparkling.  Make sure the tyres will have been painted nice and shiny with special tyre paint. But in my opinion, you should take a closer at the tyres. Before you drive your new prize position off the dealers car park.

All tyres are made to give thousands of miles of good service. They should also be well looked after by the owner. And this is the problem? Unless you know who the last owner was, then you will not know if the tyre were well looked after or not.

I know that this is probably the last thing on your mind but take a good look at the tyres, to see if they have the correct specifications, for your vehicle. If it is bought from a dealer then you can ask them if the tyres are correct for your particular caravan or motorhome.

You would be surprised how many people come to a cropper with this. Because we are in close proximity to the M62 motorway, we get many flat and damaged tyres brought into us by the motoring organisations. A large part of these people tell us that they have, “just bought the caravan” and did not know that the thing was fitted with the wrong ply tyres.

Caravan Tyres Ageing

Some are fitted with car tyres and not with a higher load rating to carry the correct weight. The worse scenario is the tyres that have caravan tyres ageing. The best sign for this is cracking like crazy paving around the bead and tread area. A good check when purchasing your caravan will detect this cracking. It can be very dangerous and the cracks will only get worse and eventually result in tyre failure.

Eric Roberts

Here is a quote from the excellent tyresafe.org

“There is no known technical data that supports a specific age for a tyres removal from service. However, in the interests of safety a number of vehicle and tyre manufacturers recommend that tyres (including spares) that were manufactured more than a certain number of years previously be replaced with new tyres, even if they appear to be usable from their external appearance and the tread may not have reached the minimum legal limit. It is recommended that any such manufacturer instructions should be followed. The age of your tyres can be found by examining the DOT (or date of manufacture) code found on the tyres sidewall markings. To understand more about tyre sidewall markings and how to check the age of your tyres download our handy guide to Caravan tyre safety”

download our handy guide to Caravan tyre safety

Tyre Blowout-For unlucky Hull City football fan on his way to the playoffs? Hull Won

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Tyre Blowout

Tyre Blowout- Saturday morning working at Pellon Tyres here in Halifax Yorkshire, UK is always an interesting experience. We can get all sorts of people with different problems to solve on their beloved cars. Would this Saturday be no exception?

When we arrived first thing in the morning.We already had a customer waiting for our attention. The vehicle was Seat car. The driver was accompanied by an AA van.Who apparently had just towed the car in from the M62 motorway (about 5 miles from Halifax).

Because, his Seat had had a tyre blowout. Like so many of today’s cars, there was no spare wheel. The AA have told me on many occasions that many of their callouts

tyre blowout

Inside of the tyre showing tyre blowout damage.

are to stranded motorists without a spare wheel. Most of the drivers do not even know, that many car models come without a spare wheel.

Tyre Blowout

Because, many of these cars are on run-flat tyres. Some are not and only carry a tin of tyre sealant, as a temporary solution. The sealant is only good for the odd nail or screw. However, would not have been any good for the tyre blowout on this particular vehicle, which had suffered bad run-on damage to the tyre.

Consequently, as you can see in the image the tyre was way beyond any repairs and the Hull supporter had to buy a new tyre. The tyre was 215/55R16 and we fitted him with a new General mid-range tyre, made by Continental tyres.

The Hull city fan was more than happy with the price of the tyre and off he went on his journey to Derby, to watch the important playoff match. Incidentally, Hull went on to win 3-0 and the day recovered well, after the supporters bad start with his tyre experience. Finally Hull won.The Tigers were promoted to the English Premier League.

BMW Mini Wheel bearing-Our customer thought it was just tyre noise to start with?

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BMW Mini Wheel bearing

BMW Mini Wheel bearing-This was one of those customers that are not your customer if you get what I mean. Let me explain? The owner of this BMW Mini wheel bearing problem had taken the car with its noise problem to two other garages, before finally bringing his car into us.

The first garage put the problem down to the tyres. They were Mini run-flat tyres, 205/45R17 and these tyres were fitted to the original alloy wheels. I personally think that the early Minis were noisy to drive. I thought it was the run-flat tyres, due to the fact that they are very stiff and hard tyres. These tyres have

BMW Mini Wheel bearing

BMW Mini Wheel bearing -Dale one of our mechanics stripping down the wheel bearing

strengthened sidewalls and are a different tread compound to give them the extra strength, for if a puncture occurs and the tyres are then driven to safety at 50 MPH.

BMW Mini Wheel bearing

The guy paid them for an hours labour and then moved to the second garage. They told him more or less the same. The tyres are noisy due to construction and noisy roads. The guy was still not happy and so came to us for our advice.

Pellon Auto centre, Halifax, Yorkshire, UK, have a large number of customers that own BMW Minis. We have come across customers with noise complaints before. We did, however, check the tyres and the tyre pressures and they were fine. The next step was the wheel bearings. This has been a common problem for us in the past.

Just as we suspected one BMW Mini Wheel bearing was found to have a little play in it. It did not look to be much, but with the weight of the car and the wheel turning then the noise would have been replicated many times.

We told the relieved customer and carried out the work on the wheel bearings. The outcome was a much quieter BMW Mini and a happy customer.

Car Problems You’ll Regret Ignoring | Reader’s Digest

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From the dreaded “check engine” light to dangerously low tire pressure, here are the automotive issues you should deal with ASAP.

Source: Car Problems You’ll Regret Ignoring | Reader’s Digest

Kia Sportage Clutch problem-Customer had bought a second Sportage but the clutch was slipping?

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Kia Sportage Clutch problem

Kia Sportage Clutch problem-This is the sort of thing that we have seen before? A customer of ours has bought another second car and the first decent journey has ended up with some sort of problem. In the case of this Kia Sportage, the clutch started slipping.

The worse part about it was that after being the owner for 4 weeks, the guy took the Kia on a two week trip to France. This particular model was a 2.0 CRD

Kia Sportage Clutch problem

Kia Sportage Clutch problem-Showing old worn out clutch

injection and had clocked up twenty-three thousand miles.

Everything went well until he drove down the French AutoRoute (French Motorway) on his way to the South. The Kia Sportage Clutch Problem started. He felt

Kia Sportage Clutch problem

Kia Sportage Clutch problem, showing gearbox

the cars clutch slipping on some of the very steep inclines that are common on the French motorways. They build their motorways over the top of the hills, where we cut through the hills to make the inclines less steep.

Kia Sportage Clutch problem

The clutch did not slip all the time only when the car was overloaded and also when the guy had to accelerate quickly. Otherwise, the Kia performed well. The customer finished off his holiday, without any further problems and made it back to Halifax in Yorkshire.

After a few more weeks he noticed that the gears were getting more difficult to engage. Finally, it became almost impossible to get any gears and so he brought into us at Pellon Auto Centre, to try to solve the problem.

Ryan Lynton our service manager, checked the car over and had no hesitation in declaring that the clutch needed replacing. The guy left his Kia and the clutch was replaced by Alex.

The guy had bought the car privately and so had no real comeback for any compensation. It is just a chance you take when buying a car privately.

Locking Wheel-Nut Problem-BMW garage quotes extortionate price to remove locking wheel-nuts?

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Locking Wheel-Nut Problem

Locking Wheel-Nut Problem; It is easy see that the big main dealer garages, have much larger overheads than a small garage like my own, here at Pellon Auto-centre, in Halifax UK. Probably all of us small garage owners have heard horror stories from our customers about the charges that main dealer garages charge their customers.

We have heard of a couple recently? One was a lady customer who was charged £700 for a standard service on her Audi. The garage was, of course, an Audi garage, and she was threatened with the old story of, “if you have your car serviced elsewhere, it would cancel the cars warranty”

Locking Wheel-Nut Problem

315-35R20 Bridgestone Runflat BMW X5 tyre

We all know that this is not true. Going back to the lady customer, I asked if I could see the garages invoice because we all know that there could have been add-ons, such as other parts. This does sometimes put up the price of a service. But no the bill was for a service and service alone. I did notice that washing the car was extra, and a few other extras totted the bill up-to-the £700 that she paid.

The lady has been one of our customers ever since and all the rest of the family now bring their car problems into us. The most recent price shock came from the BMW garage. A tyre customer of ours asked the BMW garage to change his winter tyres back to his summer tyres. His car was in for some warranty work. He thought that he would ask them “just to change the tyres whilst they had the wheels off “, The BMW garage agreed but later in the morning phoned our customer with a locking wheel nut problem? The locking wheel nut tool was missing and they could not remove the locking wheel nuts.

The shock came when they explained that the job was going to be difficult and it would cost them a whopping £500 to remove the lockers and supply a new set? WOW

The terrified customer rang Deb our depot manager? Deb told her to get the car and we worked out that the job was going to be £54. The BMW came in and Ryan removed the lockers in 10 minutes, with no problem, like many other small garages we have invested in a special tool that helps us to remove the wheel nuts on 90% of vehicles.

Ryan also noticed that one of the summer tyres to be re-fitted had a nail in the shoulder area of the tyre. The Bridgestone tyres were special run-flat tyres that

Locking Wheel-Nut Problem

BMW X5 with locking wheel nut issues

were specific to this particular BMW X5 model. This BMW comes with the  i-Drive System. On this vehicle, the tyres must be of the same tread depth, on the same axle or this interferes with the cars drive system and handling.

The Bridgestone run-flat tyres are marked with a star on the sidewall. This star denotes that these are the correct tyres for this specific BMW car.

The customer paid a total of £640 for the Locking Wheel-Nut Problem solving and two new tyres fitting. There must be a moral in this story somewhere?

Tyre Price Match-Independent tyre companies like Pellon Tyres, can always Give a better deal?

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Tyre Price Match

Tyre Price Match-One of the things that have come out of the internet price war, is the ability to price-match. Tyre price match has become part of our weekly diet of working out the right price for our tyres to sell online.

Like many other independent tyre retailers in the UK, we always try our best to satisfy the service levels that we offer to our customers. Some of these customers, have been coming to us for years and trust us to give the best quality of work and service at a fair price.

We are always busy from word of mouth recommendations and we believe that this is still the best form of advertising. We do however offer our customers the

chance to look at our tyre website at www.pellontyres.co.uk and check out the price of their tyres. This is always helpful and the internet tyre market has now

Tyre Price Match

Tyre Price Match;Range rover for 4×225/55R20 Michelin tyres

grown to 20% of all tyre sales in the UK.

The only downside to this is the fact that, we are probably not the cheapest prices for every tyre that a customer wants to buy online. It is the same scenario for all the internet tyre stores. This also applies from the smallest to the largest. There are also some tyre products that you can buy on one website but not from another. If you want a general grabber for your 4×4 in the Halifax area, then we are the only place that you would be able to buy from in the Halifax area of the UK.

We always pride ourselves on being able to source a tyre for a customer. We have a supply chain that stretches all across Europe. To my knowledge, we have never failed to be able to match a tyre for one of our customers and this is a great benefit of dealing with a local tyre company. We are there to help you, the customer can see a great effort and the many contacts that we have with other tyre companies.

Our prices are very competitive, I fact the new buzz word is “Tyre Price Match”. We are finding that our loyal customers with knowledge about our excellent service will ask us to tyre price match. We are delighted to do this? We realise, that some of us are price driven and we are happy to help if possible.

In fact, our latest tyre price match came from a driver with a beautiful Range Rover SUV. His tyre size was 255/55R20 and he needed 4 tyres. Because of the price decided to look at different websites for a price. The price on our website was a little more expensive than another tyre company. He wanted to deal with us, Tyre Price Matchbecause of his past service and trust in our work standards. He rang deb in reception and asked for a tyre price match.

The tyres he wanted were top of the range Michelin Latitude Sports tyres and the most expensive. We shopped around our suppliers and to his surprise, we were able to beat his previous quotes. The customer was delighted and we fitted his tyres on a Saturday morning. If you like dealing with us we will gladly price match is possible, we are a small family business and as they say “every little helps”.

Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem- Back-Box matched and fitted from Bosal Fiat Part?

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Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem

Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem;There was a time when certain exhaust manufacturers would do a replacement exhaust system for every car model on the market. If the car makers made it, then companies such as Bosal would make a replacement.

In fact, come to think of it, Bosal actually made the exhausts that were fitted to many of the European cars that were produced. This means that an exact copy could be purchased when the exhaust system needed a replacement.

Last week we had a customer with an Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem. The backbox was perished and needed replacing. We put the car in the air on one of our hoists and checked to see what needed replacing.

Over the years, we have learnt about many ways of repairing cars and this Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem, would turn out to be one of them?

When we were checking our exhaust book to find a replacement we soon noticed that this Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem, would not be covered in the replacementAlfa Romeo Exhaust Problem market. This usually means that the only route for us then is the main dealers.

As with all other parts the main dealers are very expensive, and exhaust parts are no exception. The original Alfa part was a one piece system from the catalytic converter back. The price from the Alfa garage was expensive, to say the least.

Alfa Romeo Exhaust Problem

Our other alternative was to match up a similar back-box as the old one and sleeve it to the centre-pipe exhaust. With the customers wallet in mind, we decided to go down this road.

We contacted our local exhaust wholesaler for advice. He said that we should look at other similar Italian car back-boxes because some models inter-changed. Sure enough, we found that a back-box from a Fiat model was almost exactly the same.

The only difference was that the exhaust diameters were the same. This was not a problem for us. All we do is to sleeve the two parts together and so that is whatAlfa Romeo Exhaust Problem we did.

The customer was highly delighted that we had put ourselves out for him and also saved him £100. The exhausts carry exactly the same warranty as the main dealer would have been.

Here at Pellon Auto Centre in Halifax, Yorkshire UK, we offer a full range of exhausts for all makes and models of cars, and will even put ourselves out to help you.

Nissan Navara Clutch replacement-Duel Mass Flywheel replaced.

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Nissan Navara Clutch replacement

Nissan Navara Clutch replacement;One of the car problems that increase after the winter driving period, is a noticeable rise in the number of clutches that we fit. The other day was no exception. One of our first jobs that were booked in was a Nissan Navara Clutch replacement.

Clutches fall into two main categories. These are cars that are fitted with manual gearboxes and also automatic gearboxes. In the UK, the most popular type of gearbox, by far is the manual type of gearbox

Other types do exist, but they are mainly on the upmarket car models and motorsport cars.

As most of my readers probably know the clutch fits between the engine and the manual gearbox and this Nissan Navara Clutch replacement, was no different.

Nissan Navara Clutch replacement

Nissan Navara Clutch replacement

The clutch enables the driver to change gears, in response to the car engine speed. This enables a smooth transfer of power, from the engine to the gearbox.

The clutch plate is made from a similar material to your brake shoes and eventually, wear away. Like anything else it depends on how the driver treats the clutch, as to how long it will last. The guy with the Nissan Navara could feel the clutch slipping when the truck was fully loaded. He also had problems engaging his gears on occasions.

Nissan Navara Clutch replacement

He brought it into us here at Pellon Halifax UK, for us to check it out. Sure enough, the clutch was slipping and in need of a new one fitting.

The Nissan Navara Clutch replacement, meant us removing the gearbox away from the engine. The Navara is an inline unit, which means that the engine and gearbox are lined from front to rear, driving the rear wheels.

Alex was allocated the job and he soon started to remove the holding nuts and bolts. The Navara is a big vehicle, compared to the clutches that we normally fit and Alex had to use hydraulic engine stands to take the weight of the extremely heavy gearbox when it was removed.

When we checked out the parts, the computer informed us that this model could be fitted with a Duel mass Flywheel (DMF). These were invented to take out many of the stresses and vibrations that were associated with diesel engine cars. In my opinion, some vehicles do not need it. This has become more obvious to me, when certain clutch manufacturers, make an alternative solid “Blue-Print“clutch to replace the DMF.

We contacted the customer and explained to him about the DMF and the solid clutch. He phoned back and gave us permission to fit the solid clutch. This was fitted and the gearbox built back up. The Nissan Navara Clutch replacement was complete and the customer collected his car and away he went.

Tyre registration-Will Europe follow the Path of the American Tyre Market?

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Tyre registration

Tyre registration- When I first saw this tyre law coming out of America, the thought crossed my mind that what started out over the pond, usually ended up here in the UK or even Europe. In other words, would we have to start registering every tyre that we sold?

I suppose the big difference is that the USA have a much bigger culture of suing people and companies for every little thing. However, when looking at the whole picture, then it could make a little sense, on behalf of the tyre Manufacturers.

The story is that every consumer that buys a new tyre has now to register their purchase, under the requirements of the federal law. Tyre retailer and dealers,

tyre registration

Tyre registration-Image courtesy of Pirelli from their tyre registration website

must provide a registration form to fill in, or an electronic platform so that you can register the purchase online.

The reason for this is that the consumer can be notified by the tyre manufacturer if there is a tyre recall or a problem with a certain batch of tyres. This will give an early warning should any problem occur and also cover the tyre producers from possible further problems from faulty tyres, say causing accidents when running too much on these tyres.

I must say that we in the UK do not have these problems. On the contrary, I think that tyre products have improved over the years and faulty tyres are far and few between. We do not have the legal culture of the states and do not take everybody to court when a problem arrives.

Tyre registration

What strikes me though is the fact that the tyre makers are going to have a heap of information about who buys their tyres and where from. Although I have read that the consumer’s personal information, will be protected by federal law, I can’t help seeing the number of tyre manufacturers that offer registration forms online.

This information could give them a mass of details about who, what and where their tyre products were purchased and many other things that I don’t know

tyre registration

Tyre registration-Image from Michelin tyres registration website.

about. I am sure that tyre manufacturers in Europe will catch onto this idea as will give them a huge insight as to who and why consumers buy their products.

As for the consumer? It will give them the responsibility to register their tyres and help become more aware of the safety aspect of their tyres. If they do not carry out tyre registration then I presume that they could not sue the tyre company, if a faulty tyre caused an accident.

As for the tyre dealers, well it is just extra work for us?

For more information… http://www.nhtsa.gov/Vehicle+Safety/Test+Procedures