Did everyone see this??

[Big5er]

It's amazing how frequently stuff like this happens. It's amazing what an HDT tire can do. 

Video here

Edited July 28, 2019 by Big5er

[Chad Heiser]

Ouch!

[rdickinson]

Back a couple of decades a sizeable rock between someone's duals became dislodged, flew back thru someone's windshield and took half his head off.

[spindrift]

Same thing happened in Philly some years back, right by the sports complex on I95.  Tire/wheel came off a trailer and bounced into oncoming traffic.  Went through the front of a minivan and killed the poor guy while his wife sat next to him.  You can't be too alert out there.

[SuiteSuccess]

Phil,

Saw that. One guy was driving along side the tire and videoing. I know he didn’t want to damage his vehicle but if he had just bumped that tire it would have gone out into the ditch rather than jump the barrier and gone head on. He could have just driven alongside acting as a barrier. Hitting the car head on meant an extra 70 mph was added to the momentum. Easy to arm chair quarterback though. 

[RandyA]

I've seen the damage to vehicles behind or across from a HDT when a trailer recap comes off the casing (alligator) and fly's up and hits a 4-wheeler.  A whole darn tire and wheel........ wow.  I hit an alligator on the roadway with my dually pulling a Prowler TT.  My truck threw the casing back at the TT and tore off a front stabilizer jack and destroyed the aluminum J panel along the bottom.  The alligator was just sitting there in the roadway.  The momentum of just my rear truck wheels running over it and throwing it back at the camper resulted in $1,500 in damage.

[Pete Kildow]

1985 going north on I-81. Flatbed had a wheel and tire on the trailer floor. Snowing like crazy and we could only run single file. Seen that tire coming at me. It jumped up and hit right above the windshield of the Cabover I was driving.

Almost crapped myself. But seeing a tire coming at you. Sure gives one a rush for a while.

[Scrap]

Preset hubs (standard on most trucks for 10 some years now) need their first take-apart service done at 500K.  Not sure that is getting done out in the world, but word needs to get out!

https://www.conmet.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/HD_MD_Hub_Service_Manual_July14.pdf

The oil list too:

https://conmet.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/10009945J1.pdf

[Nuke-E]

On 7/28/2019 at 8:14 AM, SuiteSuccess said:

Phil,

Saw that. One guy was driving along side the tire and videoing. I know he didn’t want to damage his vehicle but if he had just bumped that tire it would have gone out into the ditch rather than jump the barrier and gone head on. He could have just driven alongside acting as a barrier. Hitting the car head on meant an extra 70 mph was added to the momentum. Easy to arm chair quarterback though. 

I had the same thought.  Two or three years ago, I saw a tandem axle car trailer behind a pickup with a wheel that didn't look right--some smoke and obviously not positioned right.  Traffic was fairly heavy, and I was stuck behind a few cars probably about 100 yards back.  It was clear he was going to lose that tire, and it was driving me nuts that I couldn't get to where I could try to flag him down (approaching the scale house on the west side of Knoxville, so there would have been a safe place to stop).  I started slowing, and trying to catch the attention of the cars around me, pointing to the trailer as I was being passed.  There was still a clump of cars preventing me from getting up along side of the truck, but at least there was a decent gap between the cars that caused the log jam and a much larger number now a little ways behind.

It came loose from the right lane, rolling kind of like what was in the video (but smaller tire), and somehow managed to roll and bounce across the three westbound lanes, across the center divider, and my passenger watched it make it across all three eastbound lanes before hitting--and destroying--a tree on the far shoulder, without hitting any other cars.  The truck made it safely to the shoulder, and the few flames at the axle were quickly put out.  It could have turned out a LOT worse than it actually did.

[Twotoes]

Not a tire story but similar. When I was a kid growing up in upstate NY I remember a car hit a deer. The deer went thru the front windshield on the passenger side, was cut in half by the glass and the rear end of the deer went out the back window and thru the front windshield of the car following behind killing the female driver in the second car.