JohnJR,
That's why I don't like to recommend specific tires to someone else. Tire are more related to your driving style and what you are wanting from your tires. Tires have always been a compromise of traction vs tread wear. Secondary factors are road noise and overall ride comfort. No single tire will satisfy everyone's complete list of needs.
Some people want a long tread life, but that harder tread compound will sacrafice some traction, especially in wet weather. If you buy a true performance tire, you will get excellent traction, but will wear the treads out pretty fast.
Truck tires typically have very hard tread and side walls to deal with the heavier loads. This typically means that the ride will be harsher and often create more road noise based on the tread pattern....more agressive treads mean more noise. Generally, tires made for off-road use are not that great on the highway, and the reverse is true for highway tires used for driving off-road.
All tire makers will occasionally put out a bad tire. Remember that tires are made by individuals (not robots). The tires are made up of many pieces that are built up by hand laying the layers onto the carcass. If the operator of that tire machine had a bad day, he might put a layer on crooked and you now have a tire that looks fine but may have a balance problem, or radial run-out, etc., that will not be discovered until it's installed on a customer's vehicle.
So the only way to make good tires is constant quality control checks at each step of the construction..Unfortunately, most tire makers can't/don't have that level of quality control.
That's also why when ever there is a tire issue, it is usually isolated to a single tire plant...That plant has poor quality control and they are making bad tires and not catching them with their quality inspections.
You may have gotten a good set of General tires, while other's got General tires from a factory with poor quality control, or a disgruntled employee with an attitude, who is just slapping the tires together to meet his quota.
Yes, I said Quota! Years ago we had a General Tire factory here in Waco, TX. I worked with a guy who had previously worked for General Tire. He did their production scheduling and said that employees were given a quota to build X number of tires per day...
If they accomplished that in 6 hours, they were free to go home and got paid for the whole day. Each employee was assigned a tire machine that they used, and nobody could use that machine, and they were not allowed to use nother machine?? So if their machine broke down, they sat in the break room until their machine was fixed. Their quota was adjusted based on how long the machine was broke down. If it was down for 8 hours, the got full pay for sitting in the break room all day. Needless to say, this was a union shop.
This was after I had 3 bad experiences with General Tires, but it made me understand why I did not like General Tires, and why their tires were so crappy...at least at that time (around 1985), and that General Tire factory closed shortly there after.
Even stranger is that General Tire still owns that factory, and can't seem to find a buyer. They have a small maintenance crew there that keeps the building in repair, mows the grass, and trys to keep the up the building, but it looks depressing, like an old prison...:sad:
...Rich
