There's a chalk diagram on the garage floor right now that looks like a football play. Four rectangles, a set of arrows, and the letters LF, RF, LR and RR. Garrett drew it Saturday before we touched a lug nut, at my request, because the one way to mess up a tire rotation is to put a wheel in the wrong spot and not notice.
The Civic was at 148,640 miles. The previous owners' receipt folder shows its last rotation at about 141,900, just before we bought it, so it was a little past due, and that one is on me. The Silverado is due in a couple of weeks, at about 150,000. I rotate everything we own every 6,000 miles, or about every other oil change on the truck.
Why I bother
Front tires and rear tires wear differently. On a front-wheel-drive car like the Civic, the front tires do the steering, most of the braking and all of the pulling, so they wear faster. If you never rotate, you end up replacing the fronts twice as often and the rears dry-rot before they wear out. Rotating evens out the wear so all four wear down together and you buy a full set less often.
The tire shop will do it for about $25 to $30 if you didn't buy the tires there, and sometimes free if you did. That's not much money. I do it at home mostly because it's a good excuse to get the wheels off and look at the brakes, the suspension and the tread across the whole tire. It takes us about 45 minutes per vehicle. And it's a good job to teach a 16-year-old.
For a front-wheel-drive car with four same-size, non-directional tires, the usual pattern is forward cross: the front tires go straight back to the rear on the same side, and the rear tires move forward and cross to the opposite side. That's what Garrett drew on the floor.
The Silverado, being four-wheel drive and mostly rear-wheel drive in daily use, gets the opposite: rear tires go straight forward, and fronts cross to the rear. Check your owner's manual for yours. Directional tires, or vehicles with different-size tires front and rear, have different rules.
How we do it
- Park on flat concrete, set the parking brake, and chock the wheels you're not lifting.
- Loosen every lug nut a half turn with the breaker bar while the car is still on the ground.
- Jack up one side at the factory jack points and set it on two jack stands, one front and one rear. Nobody goes near the car until it's on stands.
- Pull both wheels on that side, swap them per the chalk diagram, and hand-start the lug nuts.
- Lower it, do the other side, then torque everything with the car on the ground.
With a forward cross pattern you can't just swap one side at a time, because two of the tires have to cross over. So we put the Civic on all four stands, two pairs, with the jack set under it as a backup. It feels like a lot of equipment for a small car. It's the right amount.
The torque wrench I got for Christmas finally earns its spot on the pegboard here. The Civic's lug nuts are 80 foot-pounds. The Silverado's are a lot more, about 140. Both go on in a star pattern in two passes, and we recheck them after the first 50 miles. Garrett set the wrench and torqued all 20 on the Civic himself. He was precise about it, which is very him.
How long ours last
The notebook has the receipts. The last set of tires on the Silverado lasted about 55,000 miles with rotations every 6,000. The Sienna's previous set made it to about 48,000. Neither one was cheap, so every extra 10,000 miles is real money. On the truck, a set of four all-terrains is a bill I'd like to put off as long as safely possible.
With the wheels off, Garrett and I also looked at the Civic's rear brakes, and the pads are getting thin. That's a September job, and it'll be his first brake job. The struts we had replaced in April looked dry and fine.
One more thing about checking tread: use a penny. Put it in the groove with Lincoln's head pointing down. If you can see the top of his head, the tread is at about 2/32 of an inch, which is the legal minimum and too low for wet roads. A quarter with Washington's head gives you about 4/32, which is where I start shopping.
Now the chalk diagram stays on the floor until the truck's turn. Rusty walked through it twice, which nobody can prove.