Retreading
Continental Sime Tyre is relocating its retreading operations. The majority Conti owned Malaysian joint venture company will move the plant from Alor Gajah in the Southern Malay Peninsula to Petaling Jaya, near Kuala Lumpur, in a series of stages, starting early 2009. The relocation is expected to be completed by March 2009.
Kraiburg Austria recently powered up a new internal mixing line. According to the retreading material supplier, the new machinery will primarily be used to produce high-performance compounds for tyre retreading. The new equipment is said to be more efficient and capable of mixing compounds with little or now oil. This means polymer chains are maintained better, which has a positive effect on mileage.
The new line is now producing K_base, K_tech, and K_plus products. Prior to the installation of the new machinery the K_tech and K_plus products, which are said to be “very demanding from a technical perspective,” have only been available in limited capacities.
Thirty-three people have been permanently laid Goodyear’s rubber mix plant in Radford, Virginia. The retreading materials facility is said to be reducing its workload from two shifts to one. According to a company spokesperson, decreased production at Goodyear’s other facilities has reduced demand for the product made in Radford.
Avon Remould Materials (ARM) has launched a website to highlight the range of products it supplies to the retreading market, at www.avonremouldmaterials.com. Melksham based ARM, a division of Cooper Tire & Rubber Company Ltd, which also owns and manufactures the Avon Tyre brand, supplies a wide range of rubber compounds, pre-cure tread and calendered fabrics to meet customers’ needs, including tread for use in commercial truck tyre retreading, aircraft tyre retreading materials and sidewall veneer.
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Big Wheel OTR (BWOTR) is laying claim to being the world’s first retreader to successfully pre-cure retread 4000R57-sized OTR tyres. “We take great pride in the appearance and quality of our pre-cured retread, because it speaks of the expert skill and infinite care we take in ensuring that these liners perform as promised”, declared managing director Albert Ngok.
BWOTR’s successful retreading of 4000R57-sized OTR tyre reflects the company’s determination to provide solutions to large OTR tyre shortage. To gauge the tyres performance, BWOTR enlisted the help of its Australian distributor, Earthmover Tyres International (Earthmover).
The Roesler Group has announced that it is to support its core retreading business with a product branded “Roesler 360”. The new offering comprises what the company terms a “fully integrated ‘Total Tyre Management System’” for buyers, maintenance workshops, operators and users of EM and OTR tyres. Roesler says that it will offer customers “a complete tyre quality management, performance enhancing and tracking facility that ranges from first fitment, right through to the end of tyre life disposal and recycling.”
Roesler 360 incorporates the combined expertise, technical innovation, manufacturing and site servicing capabilities of the Roesler Group, its comprehensive range of tyre types and sizes and its diversity of applications. It will provide a highly flexible, customer focused and traceable system, which manages, analyses and reports a tyre’s total life cycle. It also features data on the tyre’s selection, fitment, use, performance, servicing, retreading and ultimate disposal, allowing the tyre to be fully optimised in terms of continuously improving its running costs, hours, safety, reliability and carbon footprint.
B&J Rocket has developed a new online shop. As of November 2008 selected articles from B&J’s wide range will be available to everyone via www.bj-rocket.com. These include items for tyre repair, carbide tools as well as products for tyre shops and service stations.
A new Oliver Rubber retreading facility has opened in the US town of Florence, Kentucky. Equipment and supplies from the wholly owned Michelin North America subsidiary will be used by Retread America, a supplier of retreads to the intermodal and commercial tyre industries, to produce Oliver brand retreads.
“Oliver Rubber is a proven industry supplier of quality retreads, and we are confident in the company’s ability to provide excellent retreading products to our customers,” said Rodney Goderwis, president of Retread America. “We selected Oliver Rubber because they offer one of the broadest product lines in the industry, which will enable us to offer premium retreads at value prices for all segments.”
OTR Tyres has recently secured a long term contract with waste and resource management company Shanks East London to handle the firm’s onsite earthmover tyre management requirements. The earthmover tyre specialist has taken responsibility for Shanks’ six sites and 15 loading shovels.
“The OTR contract gives fixed costs for tyres and tyre maintenance and are therefore totally budgeted for by Shanks, with no sudden, unplanned or unpleasant experiences – important when a set of tyres can cost £12,000 plus” said OTR waste industry manager Paul Tracey. The parameters for the contract are set by a number of factors including working hours, known tyre wear, expected damage and repairs.
Sainsbury’s has awarded its tyre management contract to Bandvulc Tyre Contracts, the tyre management division of the Bandvulc Group. Before the announcement, the Devon-based retreading company was already responsible for tyres belonging to the top three UK supermarkets. The latest three-year agreement sees BTC manage every aspect of Sainsbury’s Logistics tyre operation.
The contract will use Bandvulc’s range of drive axle and trailer patterns together with Continental front steer tyres. In addition, BTC’s network utilises some of the Continental Network Partners (CNPs) and therefore is probably the most flexible offer in the UK today enabling solutions to be delivered even in the most difficult areas.
Harvey Brodsky, managing director of the US based Tire Retread & Repair Information Bureau (TRIB), will be a featured speaker at the Reifen China exhibition to be held in Shanghai, between December 4 and 6. Brodsky’s first presentation, titled ‘The Economic and Environmental Benefits The Retread Industry Can Offer in China’, will take place on December 4, and his second presentation, ‘The Importance of Being Ethical in Your Business Dealings with Truckers and Other Users of Your Retreads’, will take place on December 5.
“We are honoured to have been invited to make TRIB’s activities known to the Chinese retread industry and I am pleased to be able to represent TRIB members by making my two presentations.” said Brodsky.
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Official figures now put attendance at this year’s CITExpo at 6860 visitors and 311 exhibitors. With at least three main tyre exhibitions operating in China, not to mention a tyre recycling and retreading fair, other related rubber conferences, and other exhibitions in the Far East T&A asked if there will be a kind of consolidation in the show sector, with the more provincial exhibitions ceasing to be international scale events. Wilko Fong, director of CITExpo organisers, Reliable Exhibitions, shied away from commenting on the relative success of other exhibitions. Instead he preferred to quantify CITExpo’s success on its own merits: “CITExpo is now a mature show and while it is still growing now, after 6 years future growth is likely to level off and mature. The show is likely to become a more regular established show for tyres.”
CITExpo has a character of its own. There may not have been a full complement of the top 10 Chinese tyre manufacturers present at the 2008 show, but large scale manufacturers such as Triangle and Sibur took very significant sized stands. Sibur’s reasoning for its involvement with CITExpo was particularly telling. Bearing in mind the fact that, at present, the large Russian manufacturer generally exports economy-orientated truck tyres, China (home to probably the largest manufacturing base for this level of products in the world) is unlikely to be the end destination the company was aiming to reach. In stead Sibur invested in exhibiting at CITExpo in order to meet European buyers sent east to procure next year’s stocks.
The ETRMA has confirmed that, last year, the European recovery rate for end of life tyres exceeded 91 per cent, a rate more than 4 per cent higher than the previous year. This positive trend means that Europe is now one of the most advanced regions in the world in the recycling and recovery of tyres, ahead of, for example, Japan, which has a recovery rate of 89 per cent and Canada, at 80 per cent. And while the UK recovery rate, at 95 per cent, is above the European average, it still lags behind the 11 European countries that have achieved a recovery rate of 100 per cent.
Bridgestone is to “reorganise its domestic tyre sales units” on 1 January 2009, the company has revealed in a press release, cutting the number of Japanese sales districts from 25 to 19. The manufacturer states that the measures are being introduced “to improve sales efficiency at a time of poor vehicle sales”.
The leading Japanese tyre maker plans to integrate sales subsidiaries in the five northern prefectures of Aomori, Miyagi, Fukushima, Akita and Yamagata into one, which will be set up in Sendai, Miyagi prefecture. Units currently in Tokyo and nearby Yamanashi Prefecture will be unified, and a unit in Shimane prefecture, western Japan, will be merged with one in neighbouring Hiroshima prefecture. Finally two retreading subsidiaries will be merged into one.
In September visitors to the OTR Retreading Conference in Epe, the Netherlands, were given a demonstration of the newest extrusion systems developed by the VMI Group’s extrusion division. These latest products to be developed by the German based division enable the retreading of giant OTR tyres and consist of two key components – the VMI-AZ Base Constructor and the Strip Builder.
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