Has anyone experience of these re-treads and how they performed in service, during the 70’s Bandag re-treads became quite popular but their reliability depended on the quality of the tyre case they were applied to. Which is why the favourite case was always the Michelin ! What do you reckon ? or is it so long ago Bandag have been forgotten about ? Cheers Bewick.
They might of been ok at Berwicks but here we had higher standards 
All retreads were/are rubbish.
The bonding of the tread to carcass delaminates at high road temperatures and max axle weights.Proper tyres are bad enough in that regard.
I had two on the nearside outer let go during one southbound Scottish run on a warm Summer night.First the old one went not far from the changeover and then the ‘new’ replacement let go just past Oxford.
When to his credit the fleet engineer had said no retreads but somehow the thing had been fitted with a full set on the drive axle which also had the nose weight of a close coupled trailer added to a load of paper on it.Then the tyre fitter replaced like with like.
Always found Bandag to be fine unless there was a casing issue, and to be fair Bandag had higher casing acceptance standards than most, in fact the treads wore well. We stopped using them when Michelin remix became more prevalent, and run them, regroove, remix, regroove became our standard and in my experience the cheapest overall tyre policy.
Thinking of remoulds, did you ever try Trevor from Morecambe’s Chieftain remolds Dennis? Had a few on some twin tyred tri-axles which chewed up anything to try and save a bit; now they were an experience.
Bewick:
Has anyone experience of these re-treads and how they performed in service, during the 70’s Bandag re-treads became quite popular but their reliability depended on the quality of the tyre case they were applied to. Which is why the favourite case was always the Michelin ! What do you reckon ? or is it so long ago Bandag have been forgotten about ? Cheers Bewick.
Morning Dennis,
When I worked at National Carriers/Exel Logistics they used National Tyres, new premium cases on the steer axles and for the tyres on the double deck trailers but drive axles and trailers on 22.5" rims were all Bandags, I can’t recall any issues and the only time anything was parked up was on a Saturday afternoon/Sunday morning. Even the 2 yard shunters had Bandags fitted!
I tried a set of Bandags on my own motors 20+ years ago now and not impressed, they ended up on a yard truck after a few weeks as the compound was very soft and cracking around the shoulder so chucked a set of chinese ■■■■■ on which where cheaper and never had a problem with. Like to add I was running out of scrapyards and on to landfills so top brands out of the running!
Ran them on the back wheels for Smiths due to the large number of punctures we incurred in our yard and on sites but had 2 failures in fairly quick succession which ripped off the rear mudguard and brackets and rear lights, one was on the M5 just the other side of Bristol so cost us a lot of money to get repaired plus the lorry was stuck down there for a couple of days which meant getting the driver back and then having to go down and collect it afterwards. After that we went onto cheap new tyres on the back end with no more problems.
We used them here in Western Aus we tried them with other brand casings but gave that away quite quickly as the failure rate with blow outs that resulted in damage to trailer and dolly mud guards mudflap brackets etc ,the Michelin casings had far better reliability with up to 7 replacement caps over the life of the casing.
We only used them on trailing equipment never on drive and steer axles mainly in the livestock industry eventually we changed to cleanskin tubeless brands of all makes as the Michelin new tire was far to expensive to purchase for the mileage they would give.
Dig
8 were fitted across the double drive rear of a Leyland Constructor, more than half of them blew out over a matter of months, that brought the short lived trial to an end due to lights wings etc being taken out.
Went back to using decent Mich XY or equivalents, considering the amount of tip work involved punctures and damage wasn’t the problem one might have expected (and proper tyre repair workshops were more common then), the biggest danger was ploughing things like steel sprung mattresses up on the landfill and them getting wrapped around the props.
Juddian:
8 were fitted across the double drive rear of a Leyland Constructor, more than half of them blew out over a matter of months, that brought the short lived trial to an end due to lights wings etc being taken out.Went back to using decent Mich XY or equivalents, considering the amount of tip work involved punctures and damage wasn’t the problem one might have expected (and proper tyre repair workshops were more common then), the biggest danger was ploughing things like steel sprung mattresses up on the landfill and them getting wrapped around the props.
I’ve had a mattress around the prop shaft, what a mess!
Punchy Dan:
They might of been ok at Berwicks but here we had higher standards
Well Dan’l I can quite understand why you were unable to take advantage of the Bandag process for the simple reason that that the Banday system didn’t offer a retread for Skateboard cases !
DEANB:
Bandag advert 1974.0
That advert brings back memories Dean ! We used the two tread patterns on the far right but mainly the ZZ pattern which was the same as the Michelin X . I will be back onto this thread later to-day to explain why our tyre policy altered in the late 70’s and our use of the very reliable Bandag retreads no longer featured in the Bewick fleet. Cheers Dennis.
The only remoulds that we used was Michelin Remix we did try some different makes of remoulds but the reliability was useless compared to Remix. We ran rigids 4 and 6 wheelers flatbeds on a mixture of local farm work construction work long distance at max weight and was nearly Michelins all around with the New tyers and Remix also being regrooved
It must have been in the late 60s we bought 50 Bandag & it wasn’t long until we suffered ‘Tread separation’ So we stopped fitting them & took off any we had already fitted. for the next two or three years all old vehicles we were selling were fitted with new sets of Bandag tyres and thats how we disposed of those we fitted.
We fitted only new casings choosing Pirelli which were cheaper than Michelin but proved cheapest per mile n our use. We never experienced any blow outs and did not carry any spare wheels and never suffered any breakdowns.
Pirelli themselves offered us excellent service visiting monthly checking & charting individual tyre perferance which was a secondary quality check on our tyre fitters.And certainly in our case new casings were the answer as most of our traffic was time sensitive and a vehicle held up for a tyre breakdown could be much more expensive than the cost of a tyre.
There is a Bandag factory about 10 minutes away from me on the IC8,never seen anyone on the premises or vehicles parked there,but the signage is still there and in good order…so maybe,just maybe!
David
We at DIT used Bandag’s way back when but we only had our first life Michelin cases done, also we ran on 385’s as they were slightly bigger and could take a pasting. I was a great believer in the Michelin product and also used to sometimes get hold of factory runs a bit cheaper than the normal price. We also had a trial set of directional Michy’s and when they came new they only had about 2/3rds the depth of tread as a normal one but they did a fantastic job far exceeding the normal tyre, needless to say they were discontinued as they were simply too good and that was no good for Michelin.
In the end Michelin got too expensive and alot of customers looked else ware going with other brands, we had an old boy who used to call once a week with a high top Sprinter van looking to buy old cases and his mate still calls today, think they send the cases to Germany for remoulding and there was never a problem getting rid of a Michy case as they were sort after, Buzzer.
I think that Buzzer has summed the tyre job fairly well at this point !
My own experience with Bandag started back in '72 when we started accumulating a number of Mich X 1100X22:5 worn cases and we had had a number of visits from the Bandag area Manager one Trevor Stonier ( TRS Tyres of Morecambe nowadays !) as well as the then local rep Keith Vickers who went on to form North West Tyres in later years and were also based in Morecambe. The only cases Bandag wanted in those early years was Michelin and also what appealed to me was we got our own cases back from Bandag after process. I can say that Bandag did us a good job and problems were negligible as far as I was concerned. Everything worked well as we were just about a 100% Michelin user during the '70’s both having new equipment delivered on Mich as O/E and also purchasing new Michelin cases from our local suppliers. However during the final years of the 70’s we started having trouble buying Mich tyres at times as well as struggling sometimes to have new trailers delivered on MICH ! I found out that at times when Michelin became scarce they were exporting the UK production else ware to where they were getting better prices. So in 1976 I bought my first Bridgestones and at a better price than Mich so the “writing was on the wall” as the B/stones did excellent mileage with no failures other than damage. So what I decided to do was to start buying the likes of B/stone & Toyo for the units and mainly Yokohama for the tandem axle trailer fleet although when the tri axles arrived in ‘83 I stuck with both Mich ( O/E) and Bridgestone as replacements.
So the effect our change of policy had was to see the number of Mich casings dwindle which basically saw an end of Bandag as far as Bweick Transport was concerned as when the Jap tyres wore out I sold the cases, still for decent money, to Keith Vickers. I never entertained remoulds again from about 1979 even the venerated Mich Remix although I do recall having a right barney one night with a distant Tyre Supplier who point blank said he didn’t have a new Mich tyre for our breakdown but he finally gave in and said he had a Remix so I accepted that !
I first noticed Bandags in use about 1970 on my long gone Pal Malc Woodhouse’s motors and he used that very flat pattern which I did try out on trailers but I much preferred the ZZ pattern which blended in with the Mich X in the fleet.
I could talk about tyres til’ the cows come home !
Cheers Bewick. 
Bewick:
I think that Buzzer has summed the tyre job fairly well at this point !
My own experience with Bandag started back in '72 when we started accumulating a number of Mich X 1100X22:5 worn cases and we had had a number of visits from the Bandag area Manager one Trevor Stonier ( TRS Tyres of Morecambe nowadays !) as well as the then local rep Keith Vickers who went on to form North West Tyres in later years and were also based in Morecambe. The only cases Bandag wanted in those early years was Michelin and also what appealed to me was we got our own cases back from Bandag after process. I can say that Bandag did us a good job and problems were negligible as far as I was concerned. Everything worked well as we were just about a 100% Michelin user during the '70’s both having new equipment delivered on Mich as O/E and also purchasing new Michelin cases from our local suppliers. However during the final years of the 70’s we started having trouble buying Mich tyres at times as well as struggling sometimes to have new trailers delivered on MICH ! I found out that at times when Michelin became scarce they were exporting the UK production else ware to where they were getting better prices. So in 1976 I bought my first Bridgestones and at a better price than Mich so the “writing was on the wall” as the B/stones did excellent mileage with no failures other than damage. So what I decided to do was to start buying the likes of B/stone & Toyo for the units and mainly Yokohama for the tandem axle trailer fleet although when the tri axles arrived in ‘83 I stuck with both Mich ( O/E) and Bridgestone as replacements.
So the effect our change of policy had was to see the number of Mich casings dwindle which basically saw an end of Bandag as far as Bweick Transport was concerned as when the Jap tyres wore out I sold the cases, still for decent money, to Keith Vickers. I never entertained remoulds again from about 1979 even the venerated Mich Remix although I do recall having a right barney one night with a distant Tyre Supplier who point blank said he didn’t have a new Mich tyre for our breakdown but he finally gave in and said he had a Remix so I accepted that !
I first noticed Bandags in use about 1970 on my long gone Pal Malc Woodhouse’s motors and he used that very flat pattern which I did try out on trailers but I much preferred the ZZ pattern which blended in with the Mich X in the fleet.
I could talk about tyres til’ the cows come home !
Cheers Bewick.
Another point of note Dennis I always fitted complete sets across an axle and matched up any part worn tyres so a level set was achieved, this I found proved dividends in the long run on tyre ware & balance on a motor plus we always fitted new tyres on the steer axles also we stopped cutting tyres and just had them Bandaged because as time went on the Michelins never had the same depth of rubber like they used to in the beginning, cheers Buzzer.
Ian Forrest the fleet engineer and STY 38S hade to pose for a photo to be used in a Bandag brochure
back in 1978. Waugh road services believe in this product. -
A “carbon copy” of how I operated Buzzer ! Always balanced the full axle with identical tread depths and when a trailer or unit returned to the depot with a new tyre that had been fitted at breakdown, which were few and far between I would add , our tyre fitter would be right on it and remove the new tyre and replace it with a one of similar tread depth to the other three. And yes we gave up re-cutting tyres years previously although we still had a re-groover which very occasionally was used to maybe tidy up a worn edge but the main reason we stopped re grooving was that it got into the lower rubber on the Mich which was never meant to see the light of day as it was a different compound to the tread proper.
I can say that the worst tyres we ever had the misfortune to run were some Pirellis that came on 4 new C/F 40 footers in around 1977 and it was a case of that’s what they were built on and if I wouldn’t have these poxy Pirellis I couldn’t have the trailers as C/F had other Customers who were desperate for trailers !! And the other crappy tyre was Continental 1100 x 20 on a Scania 111 and IIRC everyone “blebbed” on the sidewalls. I was that mad about these Contis I threatened to lift the Rep’s Marina car up on the FLT and dump it out of the yard if he didn’t “Foxtrot Oscar” PDQ . My Pal at Lancaster Malc Woodhouse Snr had a similar experience with Conti’s at the same time which this arrogant Rep denied till I offered to invite him into my office and repeat on the loud speaker phone to Malc what he had just told me !! Red face and he F------ off never to be seen again, well not in the Bewick depot !!