Tire life

ISO 9000? If so, all it means is that the manufacturer has (should have)
procedure in place to ensure reproducibility at whatever quality level the
manufacturer has decided.

I.e. once good. always good or once nasty, always nasty.

I have to say it, I can't understand why people always try to save that bit
of money and increase their risk (even if funds are short). Plus, a cheap
tyre may wear out quicker.

I certainly can't afford to buy cheap.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

[...]

 

In reality, it doesn't work that way, at least in the automotive world
below first tier. In the automotive world, QS9000 is strictly a CYA for
the first tier customer so that when a problem occurs, they have the
smoking gun in the supplier's own documentation, or have proof that the
supplier's documentation was falsified (good product went out, bad
product was recieved at the customer - how could that be?) - the latter
is often the case because the customer continued to take mandated cost
cuts from the supplier (in what they pay per supplied wigdet) while
requiring more and more bullshit quality documentation (as opposed to
genuine quality documentation) that the supplier could no longer afford
to hire the people to implement because of the cost cuts. The
supplier's only remaining choice is to shut down (because all of their
customers are automotive and require the same bullsh** system) or set up
a streamline system of faking the documentation.

(Remember Firestone tires on Ford Explorers?)

In the same way, JIT gets bastardized. The first tier customer mandates
that inventory control is JIT for them and down thru all tiers of the
supply chain. In reality, that just means that the supplier hides a
reserve stock so that when the inevitable sh** happens in the supply
chain, they can continue to ship product and save the custmor's a**.
The customer knows about this, but realizes that it keeps them out of
hot water, so a lot of winking goes on. But it's the corporate
religion, so know one dares speak up against it or change it.

As the saying goes: If you want economy, you have to pay for it.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

ISO9000 is a marketing tool. Having ISO9000 merely means that you have met
the prescribed criteria: you have a quality manual, you have procedures
that document what you do, an accredited body has audited your facility to
ensure this is all in place, etc. etc. It has just about nothing to do with
the real quality of products. Many organizations will not deal with
suppliers that are not ISO certified; that's their motivation to get it.
It's a joke.

I've audited more suppliers than I can remember. The first thing I do is
politely accept a copy of their certification, thank them for it, put it
among the papers I have collected and get on to really auditing their
processes. The best feature it provides for me is confirmation that they
should (at least in theory) have their processes documented.

Ken

 

I said it is to ensure reproducibility. (Whether it does for a particular
company is another matter.)

And what is "real" quality?

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

 

ISO 9000 doesn't ensure reproducibility - it ensures that you do what
is documented, and you document what you do. The content of the
documents and the design of the product could be as bad as you can
imagine - as long as the paperwork is in order, you remain 9000
compliant. ISO 9000 compliance means you will have more information at
hand to go back and figure out what happened if something doesn't go
right. (And that is the basis of quality improvement). On developing a
new product, ISO 9000 plays a much smaller role in product quality -
taking a back seat to good design.
While ISO 9000 is a nice idea, and it covers some important groundwork
that really shoddy companies should have but don't have in place, 9000
is mostly a label. It can be useful to skim down a field of suppliers
when the numbers are overwhelming, but to say that ensures a good
product is a mistake, IMO. So as for tires, ISO 9000 means nothing to
me. I still rely on good brand names. Crappy tires are an insult to
everything rolling on them.

Dave

 

1) I did not say ISO 9000 plays a role in "good" quality other than
reproducing it. The purpose of having the procedures in place is to ensure
that processes are repeated. Of course if companies ignore their own
procedures that's their look-out. Documentation is the basis of an ability
to reproduce something. If you have no guideline of how to do something,
how can you ensure that each batch/product is the same? If you just copy
what you last did, howb you do you stop "creep"?

As you may know, when a business first starts writing SOPs (standard
operating procedures) for getting the quality system registered under 9000,
the SOPs should reflect actual practice, but I am sure a lot write what they
think they should be. SOPs have to be updated regularly to take into
account changes in practice.

2) It also has to be understood that if I as a client approve a sample
product (at whatever level of quality), whether it is a tyre or a chemical
or whatever, then I expect it to remain at that quality until there is an
authorised change.

IIRC 9002 does not cover the development process whereas 9001 does. ISO
9001 itself has nothing to do with the design of a new product, just with
the process of getting there.


At the end of the day you as a customer can select any criteria you like for
deciding on a supplier. I don't think anything I have written precludes
that.

I bet, though, that "good brand names" employ good, documented procedures to
guarantee consistency.

This is not a place to start:
http://praxiom.com/iso-9001-b.htm

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

 

Oops: Not a bad place to start...
http://praxiom.com/iso-9001-b.htm


DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

 

Long ago, I had Firestone 500 tires, the company's premium tire at the
time and top-rated by Consumer Reports. All 4 developed tread
separation because of moisture introduced during the manufacturing
process, and the 500s were subject to recall, federal investigation,
and class action lawsuit. Firestone replaced them with their
successor, the 721, but all 4 of mine failed the same way in 40,000
miles. I decided not to take another chance, so I replaced them with a
cheap brand called "Empire," and those tires were fine for about 60,000
miles.

 

proclaimed:

Forums you mean. And I cannot imagine why you posted to equestrian
group unless you plan on putting horseshoes on your car.

Short answer. Do NOT risk your life or the lives of your passengers
on unbranded cheap tires. Or by trying to interpret specifications
where you are so obviously out of your league.

There is absolutely no rating of a tire that will tell you anything
about the tire OTHER than the manufacturer's reputation concerning
how honest that manufacturer is in rating their tires. NOTHING.

Case in point, find a single difference between the Firestone
Exploding tires and a similar tire from Goodyear, Goodrich, Michelin,
etc.

NO. All else being equal, the thicker the tread the more the
tire will squirm and overheat at speed. NOTE that all else is
NEVER equal.

Plys can be made of steel, nylon, rayon, aramid, etc. etc. All
weigh different, and with the exception of rayon that doesn't do
too well if the ply ever gets wet due to a cut, once you know the
number of plies and what they are made of, you are still just as
ignorant of the worth of that tire as you were before you knew this.

You can make a tire last a long time. So long the rubber will be
pretty much completely oxidized before you ever see tread wear. OR
you can make a tire with traction. Pick ONE. Some manufacturer's do
a pretty good job of compromising between tread wear and traction,
most don't and the smart ones rarely try.

None, unless the resulting tire track happens to spell a dirty word
in Arabic or something. A blockier tread will be noisier, but again
you can look at tread patterns all day and still be just as ignorant
about that tire quality than you were before you started.

No. The heaviest component in a tire tends to be steel cord and tread
belts.

Good quality sidewalls are good quality sidewalls and bad quality
sidewalls are bad quality sidewalls. And that is about it.
There is no single sidewall construction appropriate for all
designs, vehicles, or driving patterns.

Sand decreases traction if on a dry road. You have heard nothing of
truth.

Post your vehicle, whether you ever go offroad, and how fast you tend
to drive plus your geographic location. Nothing beats a GOOD steel
belted radial but only Pirelli and Michelin make those with the full
wrapped tread belts. You can literally drive over a railroad spike
with either tire, and even Consumer Reports has tested this. However,
some of their models have more protection in the sidewall than others.

Or there are several other brands with consistently good, durable
tires.

 

KWS proclaimed:

It isn't just a joke, it is a cruel joke on anyone who actually
believes ISO has a single thing to do with actual product quality.
All it means is that you have document revision control for the
documents you CLAIM to use in your processes. It says absolutely
nothing about whether those processes should best be written on
toilet paper. And yes, I have been trained as an ISO Auditor.

 

larry moe 'n curly proclaimed:

If I recall correctly [and if not, am sure I'll be corrected], the
tread wear rating is done by the manufacturer against their own
designated "100 rating" tire. In other words, the ratings have
not a lot of meaning within a brand and even less between brands
from different source manufacturers--of which there really aren't
that many left.

 

And Firestone is ISO 9000.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

Also, even if the process per se does not change, at least in the
automotive industry, if location of a production line changes - whether
from one room in a building to another room in the same building OR from
a plant in the US to a plant in Mexico or vice-versa, the production
line has to be certified all over again (in the automotive industry,
that is called PPAP'ing - pronounced pee-pap - what in the "old days"
was called "first article approval").

Yes - and even that is a joke in the U.S. auto industry. The process
"requires" that a FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis - pronounced
feemah - just like the federal agency for disaster relief) be done both
for the assembly or component design *and* for the manufacturing process
for same. A FMEA on the simplest part can take a team of various
disciplines several man-weeks to complete - a very tedious process that
sometimes requires those involved to lock themselves in a room or rent a
hotel room for several days.

By its very definition, the paper work and numbers generated by the
design FMEA had to feed into the beginning of the process FMEA. If you
follow the book, it is, by definition, impossible to do the process FMEA
(P-FMEA) without the design FMEA (D-FMEA) already in hand.

When I was in automotive, our first tier customer (the ones that imposed
all this crap on us) were the designers. It was their responsibility to
feed us the completed D-FMEA before we started the P-FMEA. But the way
it really worked was that they would tell us that they did not have the
resources to do the D-FMEA, but they were still going to require a P-MEA
out of us - even though that was a philisophical, technical, and
practical impossibility. When we protested, we were told that that's
the way it had to be. It was clear that not to do it would mean we
could not do business with them. Inevitable results: We had to fake the
intitial input to start our P-FMEA (prime the pump so to speak), yet a
meaningful and useful P-FMEA relies on the starting point being good
information. Ever hear the expression "Garbage in, garbage out"? Well
that was it by definition.

So there you have it. The faking of the entire quality system started
with firm direction and winking from the customer themselves - the ones
who required us to use the system. Any wonder the suppliers end up
faking the rest of it when the faking was formally kicked off by the
customer themselves? Any wonder the Firestone/Ford tire debacle
happened, followed by the inevitable finger pointing?

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

And both the 500 and the 721 predate ISO by a good 20 years.

 

AND - Many vehicles are under-tired from the factory so the tire
doesn't stand a chance.

 

Of course, that is revalidating a previously validated process. (Not a
function of ISO 9000 but of GMP - good manufacturing practice, at least in
the pharmaceutical industry.)

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

[...]

 

As an ordinary consumer I have no particular knowledge of the ratings you
have mentioned. The rating of which I am aware is the speed, and I don't
think manufacturers fit the incorrect type. Imagine the lawsuits if a tyre
fails at 100 mph (rated at good for 110) when a car is rated to go at 120.

DAS
--
For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling
---

[...]

 

Yes, and a protectionist move by Europe against the US and Japan.

Yes, it is all about documentation and has nothing to do with the
underlying quality of the products. I can develop a process that
consistently produces bad product and still get ISO 9000 certification.

Matt

 

It doesn't even necessarily ensure that. It ensures that you document
your process(es) and, ostensibly, that you follow the processes. It
doesn't nothing to ensure that the processes achieve any particular result.

I like the definition that Crosby uses. Quality is meeting the
requirements. This both ensures that you have requirements defined for
your product and that you meet them, all of them, all of the time.

It also gets away from the "better" defition of quality that is nearly
useless. Things like saying that a Cadillac is higher quality than a
Chevrolet. A Cadillac certainly has more features than a Chevrolet, but
it may or may not be of higher quality.

Matt

 

You're American aren't you ?