Siping is the process of cutting thin slits across the surface of a tire to improve traction for driving in snowy, wet or icy conditions. Siping can also help manage tire heat when the road is overly hot. Siping is done by placing your tires (new or used) on a specially designed machine that rotates your tires while making small, nearly invisible 90-degree cuts in your tread. It’s actually easier to tell if a tire is siped by the improvement in vehicle handling than by visual inspection. Tire siping improves traction and braking, makes for a smoother ride, and prolongs tire life. Siping won’t reduce tire performance in any way. The tire tread retains its toughness due to the patented spiral cutting process. This leaves uncut areas known as tie bars intact, keeping your tread strong. The surface of your tire is made up of many smaller surfaces called tread blocks. These surfaces are especially important when it comes to icy or wet road conditions. Tread blocks get their gripping power from the numerous sharp surrounding edges.
Siping provides even more of these gripping edges. Research has shown the most effective braking power occurs immediately prior to losing traction. Siping extends the window allowed for maximum braking power, by giving the existing tread a helping hand. Your tires have to absorb impacts from the road’s surface. When that surface is more coarse or rough, your tires have even more work to do. Siping gives your tires micro-flexibility, resulting in a smoother ride. This in turn reduces the wear on your tire’s carcass (the tread, bead, sidewall, shoulder, and ply) and lengthens tire life. Heat generation is a common cause of rapid tire wear and even tire failure. While this heat is a natural result of friction, too much can be a negative. Siping reduces friction heat and its effect on your tire by allowing the tire to cool. The sipes act by isolating heat into small “corrals” and allowing air to pass between them, thereby dispersing the heat and naturally cooling the tire.
First, the siping process we use would be too expensive and time-consuming for manufacturers. Plus, typical factory siping leaves small, vacant gaps in the tire tread. The Les Schwab siping process creates gripping edges without gaps and without removing any rubber, allowing the individual sipes to support each other.Back near the dawn of the automotive era, a boater by the name of John Sipe was looking for a way to make his deck shoes more slip-resistant on wet boat decks. He came across the idea of cutting parallel slits inHe tried it and it worked! One thing led to another and the use of "Siping" for automobile tires soon caught on. Siping is a process that involves no removal of rubber, just the creation of slits into the tread blocks. It is very common in all-season and M+S automobile tires, but not too common in off-road "Mud Terrain" type tires, which feature large, monolithicHowever, there are benefits to be gained from siping these kind of tires.
The siping cuts allow the tread blocks to flex and conform to the ground easier than a monolithic tread. In wet and icy conditions, the siping cuts act like "squeegees" to cut through the water and allow contact with the surface below. They also help dissipate heat and I siped my BFG M/T tires which had about 25,000 miles of use as well as a pair of Super Swamper TSL/SX tires with about 2000 miles. improvement on the M/Ts was impressive. With my rear locker, it was almost impossible not to chirp a tire when accelerating around a sharp corner, now, it I have to really try to break it loose. it in the rain with similar results. On ice, I was able to climb a steep hill covered with glare ice in 2WD with ease. requires 4WD to get up in this condition. While it was possible to spin the tires, if I backed off the throttle, they regained traction and I'm sold (and siped), but before you start cutting, be sure to read the I will described what I did to my tires.
I think they work better after siping and I've had no problems with it. You should be aware that siping tires may void your tire warrantee, whether you do it or a shopThe Rubber Manufacturers Association, a trade group representing tire makers, neither endorses nor condemns the procedure. It says that it is critical that siping be done properly to avoid Tire makers have stronger opinions: Also, you should check your state vehicle codes, some states (like VA) do not allow siping tires, at least they will not pass a vehicle Anyway, siping was more popular years ago, when tire treads were not nearly as sophisticated as today's computer-designed patterns. Nevertheless, a large number of trucking fleets use tire siping in an effort to improve traction and extend tire life in their fleets. Saf-tee Siping, said the procedure is used across the country by a large number of tire retailers that have siped millions of passenger tires through the years.
Discount Tire and Americas Tires, two large chains, still offer the Saf-tee Siping service as well as a number of My take, if you have a tire warrantee, check the terms and conditions. If siping will invalidate it, maybe its not for you. If its OK, or you have no warrantee, and you want more traction - go You have a couple of options for siping a tire. If you have a local tire shop that offers this service, that is one. "used" tires usually cost more to sipe by machine, since rocks in the tread must be removed. The machines that do siping have a set of ganged round blades that rotate and slit the tread. placed in a machine that indexes the tire around a full rotation while running the blades across the tread. The only two adjustments possible is the depth of cut and the start and end points of the sipe. machine-siped tires and one thing I noticed was that they cut nice looking parallel slits, which no regard to the tread pattern itself.
You can and will end up with little slivers of rubber at the leading and trailing edges of tread block. Not an ideal condition IMHO. So, if you don't have a machine to do it, here are a couple of guidelines for manually siping your own tires: For an expensive tool, you can try to locate a heated tire groovingI looked around a bit and couldn't find any, so I looked forFor a cheap tool, I took an old utility knife with an old blade, broke it off and ground it down to a sharp point that projected a bit less than 1/4" from the knife body. the tire on the vehicle as long as it will turn freely, otherwise take it off for the siping process. Try out the siping tool both pulling and pushing it and use whatever technique feels most comfortable (I found alternating between pushing the knife on the nearest blocks and pulling it for the farther away ones worked best for me). One thing you'll notice is the varying width and lengths of the tread
This is done by the manufacturer to reduce tread noise. were to use a typical siping machine, which use 6 or more equally spaced cutting wheels, it would be difficult to avoid cutting too close to tread block edges. Doing the job by hand, allows you to control the cut better and follow the tread design better. Below, you can see two of the tires I siped, one a 33x9.50 BFG MudTerrain and the other a 33x15.50 Super Swamper TSL-SX. were actually easier to sipe than the BFG as they have very softMy Custom Siping ToolTM is visible in both pictures. BFG M/T ------------ Swamper TSL-SX Keen Swamper-Spotters will notice my "chevrons" are not quite factory spec. Before I siped them, I wanted to "soften" the tread up a bit by deeply grooving the center of each block to allow them to flex and conform to the terrain better. do this, I took a circular saw, equipped with a carbide-tipped blade and set the depth at about 3/8" and then cut each block at the