I'm not going to go into details as it was discussed on this forum several months ago, but there was a recent recall of valve stems from China. The problem is as you described - cracking and then failure. I understand that TM used them (as well as most other dealers - both automobile and trailer) on recent (past 3 years) models but have no confirmation on this. My wife's 2 year old Bridgestones had them. Problem is that to find the part number of the stem you must remove the tire. If you do a Google search on "valve stem recall" you will get more info than you want. I wonder how many of the failures we have blamed on the tires were actually caused by the valve stems... My personal response to this is going to be new 15" tires/wheels with metal stems. A little money for some piece of mind!
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