Construction tyres

The backhoe is the most mixed-duty machine on any site: road travel between jobs, loading on hard standing, digging in mud, and stationary digging on stabilisers. Front and rear are different sizes and are often different tread families, and the front pair usually goes first because it does the steering and carries the loader.

Two size conventions cover the same tyres. 12.5/80-18 is the bias front; 340/80R18 is its metric radial equivalent. 16.9-28 is the bias rear and 440/80R28 the metric radial. Quote both, because the machine’s handbook and the customer will often use different ones.

Ask how many road miles a week it does before choosing. A road-biased industrial tread will last far longer on a machine that travels; an R-4 or agricultural lug will dig better and wear out on tarmac.

Telehandlers do more hours than almost anything else on a site and carry their load ahead of the front axle, which means the front tyres see far more than the machine’s static weight when the boom is out.

The metric equivalents matter here. 460/70R24 is the metric form of 17.5L-24, 440/80R28 of 16.9-28, and 335/80R20 of 12.5R20. A customer asking for a 12.5R20 and a customer asking for a 335/80R20 want the same tyre.

On a hard-standing yard or a distribution site, an industrial R-4 radial gives the best hours; on a muddy groundworks job an agricultural-pattern telehandler tyre will keep working when the industrial one is skating. Farm telehandlers are covered on our agricultural range, and the sizes overlap almost completely.

Straight-skip and swivel-skip dumpers from 1 to 10 tonnes, working on unformed ground, in wet clay and across compacted haul routes. The tyre has to float when the site is soft and take impact when it is not.

405/70-20 and 400/70-20 are the standard sizes on the mid-range machines, usually in a chunky traction or industrial tread at a high ply rating. 500/60-22.5 is the flotation option on larger dumpers where ground damage or bogging is the problem.

Dumpers are loaded by an excavator dropping material into the skip, which puts a shock load through the tyres every cycle. Under-inflation is what turns that into a sidewall failure, so routine pressure checks are particularly important.

Skid steers steer by dragging their tyres sideways. Every turn is deliberate scrub, and tread life is a fraction of what the same tyre would do on any other machine. Select the tread depth, compound and casing to suit this repeated scrubbing and the site surface.

Three grades are worth distinguishing. Standard duty for landscaping and hard standing. Severe duty — heavier ply rating, deeper tread, reinforced sidewalls — for demolition, scrap and recycling. And solid skid steer tyres, moulded rubber with cushioning apertures through the sidewall, which cannot puncture at all. Solids cost several times a pneumatic and ride hard, but on a scrap yard where a machine loses tyres weekly they are usually the cheaper answer over a year.

Compact track loaders run rubber tracks rather than tyres, so the tyre question does not arise on those machines — but the same customer will normally have wheeled skid steers alongside them, and the sizes above are what those take.

Wheeled mini and midi excavators carry very high static loads on small tyres and cover almost no distance, so tread wear is rarely what removes them. Sidewall cutting and impact damage from rebar, block, kerb edges and blast debris are.

Because the machine slews under full load from a standstill, the same part of the tyre takes the reaction repeatedly. Check the bead area and the lower sidewall at service rather than looking at tread depth.

Where a site is particularly bad, foam filling is worth costing on this class of machine: it is slow, the weight penalty is tolerable, and the failure being avoided is a lost day. See our foam filling guide.

Pneumatic-tyred rollers use smooth C-1 compactor treads, which have no pattern at all: the job is to knead the surface, and any tread block would mark the mat. They are made in matched sets, and a mismatched tyre in a bank shows up in the finished surface.

On smooth compactor tyres, running pressure is the compaction control. The operator changes pressure to change the contact area and the pressure applied to the mat, so these tyres are inflated and deflated far more often than any other on site, and valve, bead and rim condition needs watching.

Single-drum rollers use a drive tyre on the rear axle instead — usually a chunky traction pattern in a size such as 23.1-26 — and those wear normally and are specified like any other traction fitment.

All-terrain and rough-terrain crane tyres are a distinct specification. They carry enormous static loads, they travel on the public road at speed between jobs, and they are usually replaced on age and casing condition rather than on tread depth.

Note the dual designations: 385/95R25 is the metric form of 14.00R25, 445/95R25 of 16.00R25 and 525/80R25 of 20.5R25. Match the load rating and the speed symbol to the crane’s road specification, not just the size, and check the date code — a crane tyre with plenty of tread and ten years on it is at the end of its life.

Mixers, tippers and grab lorries live half on the motorway and half on a site access track. They need a cut-and-chip resistant compound, a self-cleaning tread and a casing that will survive site abuse well enough to be worth retreading.

Mixed-service patterns carry an M+S marking, sometimes a 3PMSF as well, and usually a heavier casing specification than the highway equivalent. Expect shorter tread life on road than a pure highway pattern — the trade-off is that the tyre survives the site.

If the vehicle spends most of its week on the road between two long-running sites, a highway drive tyre with a mixed-service steer is often cheaper than a full on/off road set. Full details are on our truck, bus and trailer range.