Showing posts with label off road tire sizes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label off road tire sizes. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

making sense of tyre sizes

I am having to change my jeep tyres for the first time and I am now facing the universal problem of what tire?

Well, my jeep is having a tyre size of 31X10.50R15. This is not the conventional tyre sizes in mm. This sizing convention was new to me. So I dug in to figure out that this means. This is how it works




Let’s take the tyre size 31x10.50R15.
31 – Stands for the height of the tire in inches

10.5 – width is the tire in inches

15 – Stands for the rim size again in inches

So there is nothing to it. So how do you find the height of the sidewall?

Rim + (2 x sidewall) = height
Sidewall = (height – rim) /2
In this case its 8 inches ((31-15)/2)

But how does this convert to the conventional tire sizes? To do this we need to understand the how conventional tire sizes are read. Let’s take a similar tire 265/75R15

265 - Stands for the tire width in mm

75 – Which really means 75% is the tyre aspect ratio. This is basically the ratio of sidewall divided by width. Therefore to find the absolute sidewall height

Aspect ratio = sidewall / width
Sidewall = aspect ratio * width = 75% * 265 = 198.75 mm (7.82 inches)

15 - Stands for the RIM size in inches

Download this excel sheet to try the conversion with other sizes.