About Tyres

Manawatu Times, Volume LVI, Issue 6519, 7 April 1931, Page 5

About Tyres

In looking back over a scries of years I do not think anything more remarkable has occurred in value for money than is obtained by every type of road user in the matter of tyres, writes an English authority. My memory goes back rather a long way in this connection, for I can recollect, how we used to go begging for a pair of wired-on covers when those things were in their infancy with three guineas in our hands to pay for them. For something less than a third of that price to-day we buy an infinitely better article to fit on our bicycles, which gives us a trebly extended mileage to that which wc obtained 30 years ago, and yet there arc still old-fashioned people who tell us that science and research have very little connection with industry. What appertains to bicycle tyres is, if anything, more greatly exemplified in motor cycle and motor car tyres. Three thousand miles from a car tyre, even a few years before the war, was quite a respectable and satisfying record; to-day wc aro inclined to grumble at 15,000 miles, and there are any amount of personally recorded instances where a tyre has rolled miles equal to the number circumnavigating the earth and is still at work. Nor are these reductions and this increase in wear and tear due in any large measure to the present price of rubber, but are far more closely related to careful experiment, and research.