Tyre management and wheel security for lorries and trailers. Each wheel tracked from fitting to scrap.

Wheels coming off make the local paper. The everyday problems are duller: a steer tyre that slipped past ten years old without anyone noticing, a re-torque meant to happen after the first drop that never did, a set of trailer tyres pumped up at the inspection with nobody writing down that they were 30 psi down. Each of those is a record somebody did not keep.

The rules that apply

GOV.UK’s guidance on tyre age makes it illegal to use tyres more than ten years old on the front steered axle of a goods vehicle over 3.5 tonnes, and the date of manufacture marking must always be legible. On other axles an older tyre is lawful but not recommended, and owners are advised to record and monitor tyre ages. For tread, DVSA’s tyre defects guide sets a minimum of 1 mm over a continuous band across at least three quarters of the breadth of the tread, around the whole circumference, for vehicles over 3,500 kg.

Wheel and tyre management is section 8 of DVSA’s maintenance investigation questions, which look for daily monitoring of wheel security, correct fitting and torquing procedures, and tyre ages being monitored. DVSA’s Guide to maintaining roadworthiness asks for the wheel nut torque to be checked again after a wheel is refitted, and for every re-torque check to be recorded and kept on file.

A register on the vehicle’s own drawing

Each vehicle has an axle layout: steer, drive, twin wheels, lift or tag axles, and where the spare is carried, with twin-steer and eight-wheeler layouts to start from. Wheels carry the names the workshop already uses, 1 NSF, 1 OSF, 2 NSO, 2 NSI and so on. On a twin-steer both front axles are front steered axles, so the ten-year rule and the steer readings apply to both.

Every tyre is recorded when it goes on: make, size, construction, load index such as 154/150, speed symbol, pattern, DOT date, whether it is new, used, regrooved or a remould, tread, cost and supplier. After that comes every reading, move, puncture and removal, from the phone or the office. A second-hand unit arrives with tyres, and those can be recorded in one go as supplied with the vehicle, with no cost of their own. Tyre record sheets kept in Excel can be brought in, with a preview of every wheel before anything is saved.

Red and amber

Tread under 1 mm is red, and at or below your own warning level, 3 mm unless you change it, amber. A tyre over ten years old on a front steered axle is red, its age counted from the DOT date’s week and year, and from eight years it turns amber, a figure you can change. Pressures outside your range show amber. The flags show on the dashboard and the vehicle’s Tyres and wheels tab.

Pressures as found

Each axle can carry a recommended pressure from the vehicle or tyre maker for the load it carries. Where an inspection records pressures as found and as set, a low tyre becomes a fault on the sheet as the figures go in, and the register shows what the tyre was set to. A tyre found 20% or more below its axle’s recommended pressure is flagged as run under-inflated, with a note to find out why it lost pressure and check it inside before relying on it. The 20% is yours to change.

Wear and cost

For every tyre: wear in mm a month and per 1,000 miles, the date and mileage when it should reach your own tread level, and its cost per 1,000 miles from what it cost and how far it has run. Brands and part life compares makes on like-for-like positions, steer with steer and drive with drive, so you can see which drive tyre earns its price.

Wheel torque in signed stages

Each wheel job is one torque record: wheels taken off, refitted and torqued, re-torqued, and the final check. Each stage has its own date and time, odometer reading, torque, wrench and the person who did it, signed with their ID. The record is drawn on the same axle layout, so take off both nearside drive wheels and refit only the outer, and the inner still shows as off. Fit a tyre on the phone and it asks whether the wheel came off to fit it, and a yes opens the torque record with that wheel picked.

The re-torque falls due once the vehicle has done 30 miles, within 24 hours of its first use after the torquing and by 250 miles, all figures you set to match your own procedure. First use is the first walkaround, fuel, defect report or mileage reading after the wheel went back on. Until the re-torque is signed the phone says Wheel re-torque due, the dashboard and workshop list show it, and once past the hours or the distance it turns red. The final check falls on the seventh day.

When a safety inspection says wheels came off, the torque record starts there, signed with the inspection’s declaration. Torque wrenches sit in the equipment register with their serial numbers and calibration dates. A wrench past its date can still be picked, but the record says so and the office sees it.

How it feeds the self-check

Re-torques done and missed, tyre ages and tread all feed the maintenance investigation self-check and DVSA readiness, against the wheel and tyre questions they would hit.