Superstars Miranda Kerr, Catherine McNeil & Abbey Lee Kershaw – all from DownUnder – are among the 11 models in this year’s Pirelli calendar.

The Pirelli calendar is about to be released to its usual select audience of 10,000 world wide.
You first read about it on the Cars Guide site, and the three Aussie models follow a well worn trail of Australian pulchitude that has adorned this calendar over the years, at exotic locations all over the world.

But here’s the twist.

The review of the Pirelli calendar on the Cars Guide site is written by a lassie called Karla Pincott. So what’s remarkable about that?

All it shows to me is that the smell of rubber dust in the nostrils can even jump a generation or two. I bet London to a brick that she’s related to an old pioneer of the Australian retreading industry, Jim Pincott, who used to make the “Kookaburra” buffing blades used to prepare a tyre for retreading, and a whole range of retreading equipment. Jim had a flourishing business in the fifties/sixties, and his involvement in the industry dated back to the days of Sir Frank Beaurepaire. So when I said “pioneer”, I meant it!

Tyre Supplier Wanted for F1

Tenders are invited for supply of tyres to high tech automotive company.

Previous inscrutable supplier of past 13 years, exclusive supplier past three, willing to pass on tales of heartaches and drama to successful tenderer at the conclusion of the 2010 season.

Apply – if you’re rich, resourceful, and only slightly demented – to:

Bernie Egglestone PLC -F1 cars Division

(Bridgestone Firestone have announced that they are relinquishing their role as the only tyre supplier to Formula 1 Racing at the end of the 2010 season.)

P.S. The ad is a spoof.

Good Tyres, Bad Tyres, What’s the Difference anyway?

Because so much of the detail of a tyre is hidden from view, and it doesn’t mean much to the average tyre buyer anyway, the customer feels quite entitled to ask “Why does this tyre cost more than that tyre, and what does the difference mean to me anyway?”

Because more often than not, the tyre is presented in a vertical stack alongside other tyres, the salesperson is quite likely to launch into a comparison of tread and buttress design and width, tread pattern design, accompanied by claims of superior mileage, roadholding, reliability, and “it’s on special this week only” sales presentation. The reason is that either the customer can see these things for themselves, or can conceptualise, or are prepared to accept because the salesman obviously knows more than they do.

The question remains though – “why does this tyre cost more than that tyre?” It’s a valid question from the customer’s point of view. Why do some tyres cost more than others, and is it worth it to buy the more expensive tyre?

So start with “how recent is the design?” Most new tyre designs (sizes, patterns, constructions) are brought into production to meet the requirements of the design engineers of new cars. If they didn’t ask for particular improved tyre attributes, then the design process would stagnate. They drive the improvements, to meet design parameters that they want to incorporate in their new car design. This process goes on worldwide, all the time.

The tyre company, needing their business, designs, qualifies, tests extensively, government certifies their new tyre design, and submit prototypes to the car company for evaluation on their new design car. To this stage, this has cost a great deal of money in technical resources, tooling costs, mould manufacture, and qualifying testing. Then they wait while the car company engineers evaluate their tyres against others from competing tyre companies. So there is no certainty that these prototype tyres will ever see enough of a production run to amortise their development costs.

Remember, each new car has at least 4 new tyres, possibly 5.

So hurrah, at last the car company accepts the tyre for production, and contracts for supply at a particular rate at 12 hour’s notice is arranged, at a price that is barely adequate.

Then, after two to three years, replacement tyres are required by the car buyer from a retail tyre store, in competition with tyres from all over the world in the same size. This is possible because of currency alignments, and because tyres are all made to conform to the same standards regarding size dimensions, speed and load carrying capacity.

But there emerge major differences in appearance, because the car engineers may have specified a quiet riding tyre for a saloon, whereas more eye-appealing tyres from say Europe in the same size may have been designed for a more sporty vehicle; or advertising campaigns, consumer reviews may influence both retailer and buyer; the reputation of the brand definitely carries weight; word of mouth approval; bulk package deals from wholesaler to the retailer; or simply the skill of the salesman in influencing the customer’s choice, based on questioning the customer as to the application of the tyre. Always in the background, is the appeal of low price.

Another 3 years on, another 60000 kilometres, time’s moved on, probably the car’s changed hands, the pattern is no longer available (the moulds do wear out), fashion has changed, tooling costs have been recovered, so the price of the product has been lowered to meet competition and retain market share. Besides, 18 inch wheels have superseded 15 inch- that wasn’t so long ago, was it! Your once newly developed tyre has now become the price leader into the tyre shop so that hopefully you will buy something better, more modern, better performing, more costly.

Tyres are all fat and black, look the same from the outside, they’re almost all truly round these days, and the detail of the construction differences are inside the casing. However, small differences inside add up to small improvements in braking, handling, cornering, steering response (lane changing ability), quietness, and harshness over concrete road joins, durability under high speed/high load conditions, and other measurable improvements. All carry a cost, improvements are small, but when it comes to the crunch, may make a difference to your comfort or wellbeing. Just the design of the tread pattern, the scrambling of the tread elements to break up the noise generated, can add considerably to the cost of the mould. Then you have to have the I.T. expertise to be able to produce the noises the pattern makes on a computer first.

If you buy a bad tyre, it will be with you for a long time.

Tread life isn’t the be all and end all. A survey of Australian motorists some years ago showed that the quality most desired in a tyre was the ability to stop, and handle, in the wet. Perhaps the average motorist is more discerning than they are given credit for!

If you would like to know more, have a look at the blog on www.carbonblack.com.au, and the “All About Tyres” section too.

Goodyear Wingfoot teams with Aussie Lightfoots

Helen and John Taylor, an Australian couple who have made a speciality of setting records for low fuel consumption in the USA, have done it again.

Converting their miles per American gallon to litres per hundred kilometres yields an astonishing 4.155 litres /100 km in their 2009 Volkswagen Jetta diesel.
This time they were riding on Goodyear Fuel Max tyres, and improved on their 2008 figure by a further 15.4%!

This consumption is more fuel-efficient than the most popular hybrid, and shows what can be done with modern diesel technology, careful preparation and fuel saving driving techniques.

Follow this link to learn more.

So how do they do it? Tyres obviously play a part, since Goodyear sponsored their 9000 mile circuit of the States. We are constantly told to maintain high air pressures if fuel savings are desired, but what are the limits? A tyre usually absorbs around 2 KW just rolling around under load at 120 km/h.

The safe maximum pressure of a tyre is shown on the sidewall, and for a passenger tyre is in the 36 (Standard Load)- 42 (Extra Load) p.s.i. range. It will not burst at 43 p.s.i., but a maximum is specified to maintain a margin of safety for tyre abuse such as potholes and rough edges. So economy drivers go to the limit, or beyond. A tyre with 15 p.s.i. pressure pulls nearly twice the rolling resistance as the same tyre at 33 p.s.i. at 120 km/h, the higher pressure giving a fuel consumption improvement of about 4%. Steel belt radials have the lowest rolling resistance, too.

Staying with tyre design, a narrow tread width, shallow tread pattern, and a rounded tread arc radius all contribute to lower rolling resistance, and with specially compounded tread rubber it is possible to design a tyre to maximise the reduction in a tyre’s contribution to fuel consumption.

Preparation of the vehicle using low friction lubricants, a well run-in engine, diesel fuel designed to give “more bang for the buck”, and other tricks of the trade are also used, such as refuelling at low ambient temperatures, like the middle of the night.

But driver’s skills are required to get good figures. Feather-footing, low top speeds, shift points carefully calibrated, travelling when wind speeds are low, smooth car surface with no unnecessary projections, climbing hills carefully (just making it over the top), and no air-conditioning are techniques used. Depending on the rules of the contest, in most cases coasting downhill, and drafting, is prohibited. In certified fuel economy runs conducted in Australia, an independent observer travels in the car to prevent this.

Want to know more on the tyre angle? In our All About Tyres section you will find Green Tyres are Black, David’s ten tyre tips, and Exploding Cylinders which will expand on rolling resistance and fuel consumption.

For the Techies – How Hard is Rubber?

Natural rubber is the sap of a rubber tree, converted to a solid by coagulating it with acetic acid. Rubber used in tyres is generally the product of an oil refinery.

When combined with chemicals such as carbon black, antioxidants, and hosts more, sulphur added, the mixture subjected to heat and pressure, it comes out vulcanised. Sulphur makes the process irreversible.

Part of the “black art’ of making up the various mixtures used in the many components of a tyre, is varying the “hardness” of the rubber compound. For example, the rubber around the bead wire is compounded up to be quite ‘hard’ since it doesn’t move when the tyre rolls along. Conversely, the sidewall is ‘soft’, because it moves around a lot- it flexes.

However, most attention is paid to the tread compound, because this affects the wear and grip of the tyre because it’s the only part that hits the road.

How is it measured?

The tool used in the trade is a Shore A Hardness Durometer. Never heard of it? There is a range of them, designed to measure the hardness of different materials.

It simply is a small hand held tool with a domed plunger that is pressed into the surface of the rubber. The reading obtained on the quadrant scale when the needle is first pressed squarely against the rubber, is the hardness. Some cautions though- rubber hardness varies with temperature, it softens as it gets hot- every race car driver knows that. Also, the rubber ‘creeps’ away from the plunger, and as you hold the plunger against the tyre, the initial reading falls away.

So that is absolutely no help when the salesman tells you that the tread of the tyre that he’s selling is hard and long wearing. You might get a clue by pressing a reasonably blunt pencil into the rubber. If the rubber is “soft” the indentation might stay around a while after you remove the pencil. If it’s “hard”, the indentation might disappear quicker than for a softer rubber.

That’s not much help either, is it?

This is because there are many variations on a theme to make a tread compound. But beware of the salesman who tries to tell you that the tread is long wearing, and hard, and gives good grip, particularly in the wet. That’s nirvana, and hasn’t been achieved yet, to my knowledge.

So treads and sidewalls might have 1-2% sulphur, bead wire compounds 6% sulphur, and the old fashioned black ebonite ruler that granddad had, contained 35% sulphur, and was as hard as the hobs of hell.

I did say that it was a “black art”!

CarbonBlack TyreXchange on A Current Affair

Thanks for those of you who continue to promote CarbonBlack to your friends and to the media!

Last month A Current Affair on channel 9 covered the CarbonBlack’s tyre research and tyre dealer directory. It was all about looking for new tyres and the fact that only few people knew about their tyres. ACA had done an interesting  study showing that the less informed you are the more money you could possibly pay for your tyres.

Then, the show explained how you could research tyres and compare tyre dealers on CarbonBlack.

This is the main reason why tyre dealers join CarbonBlack:

CarbonBlack tyre dealers offer the right price and the right service. They are reputable dealers whose purpose is to satisfy customers rather than to sell by any means. That’s why our dealers accept to share information and to be reviewed on CarbonBlack by their customers. They understand today’s role of social networking as the most effective way to market, and that a longer term customer is worth more than a one-off over-paying one.

Tyre Buyers: On the old subject of price, remember to always compare apples to apples, or tread to tread. When replacing your tyres you get what you pay for.

• Know what you’re after: safety, performance or cost savings – you will not get all three in one tyre
• Do your research on the tyre dealer. Read reviews (eg. on CarbonBlack)
• Ask questions. Be sure you understand what you’re buying.

An informed customer is an empowered one.

The whole segment on CarbonBlack is available in the link below.

http://aca.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=860857

Why CarbonBlack?

Our Website is named CarbonBlack- because that’s what tyres are made of – right?

Well, partly – about 35% of a tyre is carbon black.
So what is it? And where does it come from?

As with most things these days “Oil” is the answer, which is one of the reasons why tyres cost so much.

Carbon black USED to be made from burning natural gas in insufficient air, and collecting the smoke that resulted, rich in carbon, on cooled metal surfaces. This was sometimes called “lampblack’, or later “channel black”. The pollution it caused was indescribable, let alone the waste that escaped to the atmosphere.

So another process took over in the early 1950s, called “furnace black”. Oil was burned inside a furnace in insufficient air, and the resulting carbon collected at the outlet. Dependent on the type of oil burned, the design of the furnace, the operating temperature, the flow rates, nozzle design, and any number of variations, it was quickly discovered that the actual properties of the carbon black (still just carbon remember) could be varied.

A whole new family of carbon blacks resulted, from the smallest particle size, intensely black as used in printing inks, to the larger and softer grades used in say motor tubes, which had quite a grey colour, and all the grades in between.

But wait- there’s more, as the Demtel man used to say.

The actual surface of each carbon particle could also be varied, to be extremely absorptive or low absorption. This structure varied the way that the carbon molecules could be intimately mixed into the long chain rubber molecules, which affected the degree of reinforcement imparted to the rubber by the carbon black. This then had a direct affect on the physical properties imparted to the rubber by mixing it with carbon black, such as wear, cut resistance, tensile strength, stiffness (modulus), elasticity, heat build-up under flexing, and a host of other properties.

So the fast developing science of carbon black became dominant in the development of rubber compounds. Without carbon black, tyres would be slippery in the wet, would wear out very quickly (particularly when hot), and generally would not be suitable for today’s automotive uses. That’s just the tread. Other blacks were designed for use in the casing, in the tubeless liner, bead compounds, bead stiffeners, and the many other applications used in a tyre.

The name of our web site pays homage to its importance to the rubber industry.

Terrible stuff to get out of your skin though. I couldn’t wear a white shirt for years!

CarbonBlack talks to The Australian Business

CarbonBlack talks about the importance of lead generation and it’s expansion into parts and accessories ecommerce. CarbonBlack in the Australian.

- The Australian, June 2009

CarbonBlack releases a widget for consumers to search and compare tyres online

Small, portable, fast…

What’s smaller than the latest smallest mobile phone, but much more portable ?
It’s the new “search tyres” widget from CarbonBlack.com.au, one of the major providers of automotive and tyre industry information in Australia.

Following on the recent launch of a car parts online shop on the website, CarbonBlack.com.au is further developing ways in which motor vehicle owners and car enthusiasts can easily and quickly “hook up” online with tyres and spare parts suppliers, as well as service providers to get their tyres changed, their car serviced or add a new tow bar to the ute !!

the tyre widget available at www.buycartyres.com.au

With the launch of this fast, light and highly portable web widget, Australian drivers will be able to instantly search and compare tyre models online anywhere on the web.

This is in line with our strategy to gain a significant presence in the auto service space this year

said CarbonBlack.com.au’s Sales development manager, Nigel McBride.

CarbonBlack is already discussing white labeling options with several parties, as other service / parts providers realize how they too can provide unique information with a new revenue stream in mind

he added.

The tyre widget is currently in beta version, but CarbonBlack has made it available for anyone to use at www.buycartyres.com.au.

In the month of April, over a million tyre models were viewed on CarbonBlack.
Now, the technology can be incorporated into other automotive trade businesses with minimal effort.

Revolutions in the tyre industry

Trivia question – two North Carolina residents changed the course of the world in 12 seconds 104 years ago. What were their first names?

Only 2 out of 700 (majority Americans) knew the answer – Orville and Wilbur.

As a result I have a very nice travel clock. Thank you Princess Alaskan Cruises. Took the mind off the 7 metre waves in the Bay of Alaska too!

So after 3 years or so, the Wright Brothers changed from skids to wheels and tyres (tires). These were made by Goodyear.

Goodyear are still a major supplier to the world’s aviation and defence industries, and they celebrate the centenary of the first tyres made specially for aircraft this year.

The Wright brothers chased weight savings assiduously, and Goodyear made special lightweight tyres for them. Aviation designers still are chasing weight reduction and tyre performace. Latest development are tyres for the Gulfstream jet which have an aluminium bead wire core, rather than steel. This saves 1.3 kg per tyre!

Want to know more about Goodyear’s centenary of aviation tyres? Go to  http://motorage.search-autoparts.article/articleDetail.jsp?id=950056