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Originally Posted by nwhouston
[The tires on my 3124] run at 65 psi (D's). When hot they can get up to 70 psi, in which case I usually let the cold (aka morning) pressure drop down to about 58 psi so I stay close to 65 psi once we are warmed up down the road. I do know that too much air can definitely add to this problem.
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Tire manufacturers specifically tell you not to de-air the tires to compensate for the warming effect. The pressure rating on the sidewall, and in the load inflation tables, is the manufacturer's specified COLD PRESSURE, and the tire design takes into account the warming effect. The manufacturer is careful to say that COLD does not mean "refrigerated". It just means "not yet driven on today". Remember that by deflating from 65 psi cold to 58 psi cold, the tire's load rating for a 15-inch Goodyear Marathon drops by two hundred pounds per side.
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And I know that the road you are on is a big factor.
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That's for sure. On our recent trip from Arizona to Maine, we traveled on 50 miles of old concrete road in Colorado - the kind of road where they poured a series of concrete slabs on the ground, separated by narrow expansion joints, and the concrete settled unevenly as it cured. The result is a POUND POUND POUND as you traverse the joints. It did quite a bit of damage to our TM. The real point I'm making, though, is that we have towed our TMs for somewhere around 100,000 miles, always with a WDH, and although we've had some screws shake out over the years, the pounding problem never really showed up until we hit this long stretch of bad road.
Our experience suggests that the WDH is not a culprit in the pounding. I have always felt that a lot of the problem is due to the fact that the TM doesn't have shock absorbers like your tow vehicle does. This, combined with the pounding road, is what does the damage.
Bill