Let's test your diagnostic skills by judging tire wear!, My rears are torn up! Options

[blu94gt]

Ok so it's been a while since I've worked on cars for a living. My rears are showing two different types of wear patterns, in the form of cupping and inner tire feathering. The tires have always been noisy since I bought the car over a year ago, and I know the alignment isn't perfect. I post this up for a couple reasons: to get a second opinion before I dump some money into the car, and to educate some of the other guys on here about what all you can see just from how your tires are wearing.

Now in both pics you can see the dramatic inner tire wear in the form of light/dark sections, and you can somewhat see how there's a darker stripe across the tire where it is worn differently: this is where the tire is flat spotting/cupping, both my rears are pretty much 16 sided polygons lol.




Here's the educational part: the feathering on the insides of the tires is from the toe angles being negative, or toe out, meaning the wheels point outward when the car is moving forward. The cupping can be cause by a few different reasons: wheels/hubs out of line, unbalanced tires (usually REALLY unbalanced) or bad shocks/struts.

The cupping is what concerns me. I've never seen a cupping pattern this bad, the tire varies in tread depth from about 5mm to bald all the way around the tire. The struts aren't leaking and they pass the "bounce test", the wheels/hubs aren't bent or anything, and the wheels themselves are fairly well balanced. The only thing I can think of is the struts are bad, despite the usual factors.

Oh and if it matters the tires are Bridgestone Potenzas, don't remember the exact model number. They have been on the car a few years, have seen about 60k miles if I remember correctly from the PO's service records.

[richee3]

Not that this has anything to do with what is happening to both mine and your tires, but I know that once a tire starts a wear pattern, it continues that wear pattern. That sucks, especially considering that a deer ran out in front of me on my drive home from buying new tires last time. Flat-spotted them 20 minutes after paying for them, and here I am, 30,000 miles later, and I still have flat spots on my tires. All 4 of my tires are doing the same thing that yours are, and I've been told it's just the toe, like you said. One tire shop attributed my uneven tire wear to blown struts right after I bought the car. They said they could check the car's alignment, and it would read just fine, but if you put some weight in the driver's seat, it made that strut sit down a little lower, putting pressure on the inside of the tire. I have replaced my struts since then, and the car still does it, so I think that shop was just trying to be a tire shop and trying to make some money. But like I said earlier, I am watching this thread closely. Tires aren't cheap and I'm on my 4th set in 3 years.