I was able to stave off the early demise of my tires by putting in a maintenance day and re-setting my front end alignment on my Catrike Expedition. But while I was successsful at putting it off, I knew it would eventually be time for a new set of shoes.

That time arrived at the end of this past week.

Because of the degree of wear I’ve been watching the tire pretty closely - checking it before and after each ride. I’ll be honest and admit that I went ahead and did a couple of additional rides even after I first noticed the hole forming. As always, it’s hard for the desire to repair to compete with the desire to ride.

Fortunately, back when I did my maintenance day, I also went ahead and ordered another pair of front tires. I was hoping to get some additional distance out of the old ones - and I did - but I definite wanted a backup in case my efforts as an alignment technician were unsuccessful.

On that score, however, I have to say that I think things came out pretty well. When I first noticed the uneven wear, and realized that I was probably going to have to adjust the alignment again, the tires had about 700 miles on them. With the alignment adjustment I was able to get another 855 miles out of them despite the premature tread loss.

The wear between the two sides was not really even - while the right tire had reached a point of near perforation, the left still had some life in it:

I briefly considered just changing one tire - very briefly. But while I don’t think uneven tread depth is going to have the same type of difficulty as it might, say, on an automobile, I do want to see what type of wear I get across two new tires now that I (think I) have sorted out the toe-in. And I figure that I can keep the left tire for a spare in case I need one in future - it will fit the Expedition’s front wheels and the Pocket’s rear wheel, so it’s good to have all-round.

Tire changing is getting easier each time I practice it - though I do once again have to give a lot of credit to the Koolstop Tire Bead Jack. This deceptively simple, and relatively inexpensive tool goes a very long way towards making tires easy to put on. It makes up for a lack of years of experience and the commensurate hand strength. With its help, I managed to swap both tires with exactly zero swearing.

And I do almost nothing without swearing...

So - now she’s all set with a new pair of shoes: