Who goes to these seminars?

Several times a year, Bridgestone invites customers to TPG for a day-and-a-half of intensive seminars on tire technology and testing.
If you’re invited, your Bridgestone representative will accompany you, and field engineers from your region – along with TPG and Bridgestone engineering
personnel – will conduct the seminars.

How many attendees are there?

The usual group is about 20 to 30 people.

What goes on?

One minute, you may be discussing automatic tire inflation systems. The next, you could be behind the wheel of a truck, making faster and faster circles on a wet skid pad.

The idea is to combine theory with the real thing, so you can experience both sides of the world of tire testing.

What kinds of things will we see?

No two TPG seminars are exactly alike. Bridgestone engineers have a “library” of courses and demonstrations to choose from, and always “tailor” the experience to the group.

If you and other guests want to see fuel economy testing, you can get a demo of fuel economy testing. If traction is your thing, traction testing is what you’ll see.

What went on during the one you visited?

The test facilities are scattered over more than 6,000 acres, so the first thing was a bus ride with stops along the way to get oriented.

Classroom work focused on tire construction, factors affecting tire life, the importance of inflation maintenance, alignment and concepts like balance and runout.

These were supplemented with practical demonstrations, using TPG facilities.

What kinds of demonstrations?

There’s a simple test, but one that’s especially dramatic in the west Texas desert:

Let a couple of tires stand all day in the blazing sun, and from time to time, measure their temperature and inflation pressure.

It’s a good way to see how temperature affects inflation, and why you should never bleed air from a hot tire.

Another popular activity is the “damage clinic.”

The group breaks into small teams, and each examines dozens of tires, all of which have different damage or wear conditions.

With a few tools and a TMC reference book, you can play detective, trying to determine what caused the problems these tires exhibit.

Later, TPG instructors give you the “correct” answers.

Most attendees rate this experience one of the best.

Probably because in just a couple of hours, you get to see more wear and damage conditions than you might see at your fleet in a year.

What about driving the trucks?

You may be able to drive a tractor onto TPG’s wet braking skid pad. It’s a long, straight piece of concrete, wetted with a standard amount of water.

You accelerate to 30 mph, then slam on the brakes – with both ABS and drive axle brakes disabled.

The only thing stopping you is the steer tires.

You get to try some from Bridgestone – and another brand – and learn how much difference tires can make.

Is that the only driving?

In another test, you might drive round and round on a circular skid pad, half wet half dry.

As you increase speed, you feel the g-forces in the turns and sense when the tires feel like they’re breaking loose.

In the stopping distance test, you measure the actual distance required by different tires.

That’s “objective testing.” When you drive the lateral skid pad, you’re doing “subjective testing,”

feeling rather than measuring the effect.

What’s the point of that?

Both objective and subjective testing are important. It’s one thing to know quantitatively how tires perform, another to be able to feel what drivers feel.

Both can help you better understand what drivers tell you.

Which test is the most popular?

One of the favorites is the “sudden loss of inflation pressure” or “blowout” test.

Take a look at the back page of this issue of Real Answers for a freeze-frame view of that one.

What else can we see?

You may observe the effect of severely misaligned toe. With the special gear at TPG, a tire can be so badly misaligned that you can see effects after just one turn around the 7.7-mile oval track.

Or, you might see what happens when you brutally drag a highway-style tire and an urban/metro-style tire across a series of zigzagging curbstones – and how much better the urban/metro-style tire holds up.

In the last issue of Real Answers, we showed a variation on this test, and saw how just two close encounters with a curbstone could cause permanent damage.

How can we attend a TPG seminar?

TPG is an actual working test facility, so the number of seminars and space at each is limited.

Ask your Bridgestone representative to find out when there might be an opening.

It’s a “total immersion” in tire testing that you’ll never forget.