First of all, let’s take a look at what are truck tyres exactly?

Truck tyres are essential accessories for a truck; we tend to forget that tyres are the only parts of a vehicle in contact with the ground. This is why it is especially important to choose the right tyres. Many brands offer ultra shock and friction-resistant tyres capable of driving for hours over long distances and carrying hefty loads. It is also essential to know the size of tyres you want to buy as not all the huge tyres you are going to come across are intended to be fitted to your truck.

Some exceptional advantages of truck tyres

The majority of truck tyres are tubeless and are based on radial technology. They are incredibly robust and resistant, enabling them to withstand cumbersome loads. The lateral structure of truck tyres is more reinforced than that of commercial vehicle tyres, which gives the latter an evident solidity.

Take a look at GILL VIC TYRES and choose truck tyres of all sizes that fit better with your vehicle.

To prevent premature tyre wear, save fuel and improve handling, aligning the tyres of a heavy truck is an essential preventive maintenance measure, just as it is for other types of vehicles. Yet, contrary to what one might think, the method is not very different.

Relying on a specialist

Wheel parallelism adjustment is a measure that ensures that the tread has a perfect contact surface with the ground. This way, the wheels will not pull to one side in particular, and it will be easier to maintain the right direction.

Also, as tyres do not necessarily wear at the same speed and are not always perfectly identical, even when they come from the same batch, it is essential to align them evenly. This can be after a certain number of kilometres, for example, or at each tyre change.

To carry out proper alignment, especially for a heavy truck, specialised equipment is required to carry out this task, and, you can’t leave the job to just anyone. For example, it is essential to call upon the services of a maintenance shop that has an alignment bench for heavy trucks.

This equipment and technologies, such as a laser system or a computerised system, make it possible to determine the position of the wheels with each other, particularly along the front-to-rear axis. It then becomes possible to target faults and make the necessary adjustments, if required. This maintenance operation may seem simple, even useless in the eyes of some, but it can still represent thousands of dollars in savings for a heavy truck owner.

Precision work

Thanks to the high-quality technologies used to detect misalignment of heavy trucks, specialists can use the different settings of a vehicle and its wheels to guarantee ideal and exact parallelism. This is particularly important as heavy trucks can have several axles which make the task more difficult, but not impossible.

Finally, aligning the wheels of a heavy truck often goes hand in hand with balancing, also known as wheel balancing. The two methods may be confused, but they are not the same, since the second is more a matter of testing the weight distribution in the wheels. This should be done with a machine that turns the wheels and simulates road conditions. Anomalies are corrected using weights so that the tyres are all equal.

In other words, balancing is an entirely complementary task to alignment. These two maintenance measures are essential to ensure good road holding for heavy trucks. This makes driving smoother and results in significant maintenance and fuel savings.

So, with professional service, the right technology and the right timing, any heavy truck owner will agree that alignment is an integral part of good maintenance.