The Retread Process: As Good As New?

If the guys who sell tyres on the country’s fast fits are to be believed, the retread is dead. There are regular anecdotes coming back through the grapevine from customers who have been told that: they don’t make car retreads any more; you’ll only get 3,000 miles on a retread; or even more insidiously – they are dangerous – I wouldn’t have my mother-in-law driving on them… One wholesaler who had just delivered a batch of retreads to a client overheard that same client tell a customer asking for the very product that he had just delivered that they didn’t carry them!There may be numerous reasons for this misinformation about retreads. It may be that the fitters simply don’t understand the process of either tyre manufacture or tyre retreading.

It may be that there are greater margins to be made from selling budget tyre brands. It may simply be down to personal prejudice. There is an assumption made by many in the tyre business that everyone understands what a retread is.

Since very few in the tyre business understand the process of tyre manufacture, then even fewer are likely to understand the process of tyre retreading – yet the two are very closely related – especially in the hot cure process.T&A took the opportunity to tour one of the UK’s leading retread operations at Vacu-Lug to view both the hot cure and the precure methods operating side by side (these are the two main methods of retreading)..