decent wide whitewall sought for 1992 Cadillac Brougham d'Elegance

Tire traction will be the least of your worries in south Florida. That baby will rust away long before she skids...

That's BS. Cars do way better there than in the Northeast where they dump butt-loads of salt on the roads. Cars in S. FL looks great 50 years old.

Not if you live near the coast, especially the Atlantic beaches.

Wrong again. Ever been there? Cars look spectacular there. Used to live within a mile of the beach in Boca.

Maybe cars are built better these days. I had relatives living near Homestead in the 60's. The warm, most salt air was so pernicious that even the glass and aluminum on cars would rust ;-)

Most every vehicle in the condo parking lot was a total rust bucket...

you could try diamondback; I believe that they will make any tire into a whitewall. Of course then you are relying on *them* for your warranty not the original mfgr. of your tire - but you could, theoretically, have say a BFG T/A wide white, which is sort of what I'm envisioning that you're looking for.

I'm not aware of any major manufacturer of tires still making wide whites, even the wider-than-thin-white-stripe type as opposed to what most people think of as "wide whites" which are all the way to the rim.

A lot of caddys seem to be rocking Vogues now, although I think the white-and-gold stripes just look kind of weird.

BTW, what happened to Avon? I was just doing a quick web search of all the tire mfgrs. that I could think of off the top of my head to make sure I wasn't forgetting something, and they seem to only be doing motorcycle tires now?

Oh, and just for the record, I can't envision me putting wide whites on... well... anything. But your car, your money...

nate

N8N wrote in news:fb17f8df-cea5-4e48-a013- snipped-for-privacy@a12g2000yqm.googlegroups.com:

A while ago I saw a 1940 Buick with what appeared to be add-on whitewalls. These were very thin white rubber skins that were curved to match the tire, and were somehow held on to the actual blackwall tire. From a distance, they looked like true wide whitewalls. Anybody still make these?

When I was a kid, my father was too cheap to buy whitewalls. He'd buy cheap tires, then purchase a paint of some kind from the auto parts store that allowed him to paint whitewalls on the existing tires.

If you're up for doing it and they still make the stuff, this might be a reasonable way to get a wide whitewall.

--scott

There are still some Avon tires for car listed at tirerack.com

Thanks for the links. But they're all so damned EXPENSIVE! Firestone FR721s used to be about $71 apiece. What happened to them? Are they coming back?

When's the last time you bought "specialty" tires?

The Derfer wrote in news:fa767fe7-928d-40bb-a925- snipped-for-privacy@s20g2000yqh.googlegroups.com:

In what year's dollars?

Continuous currency debasement by the government over the years means those dollars get a LOT smaller as time goes by, so you need more of them to buy the same thing. Do you still earn $25 per day?

True, but not as true now that they've switched to other salts besides NaCl for road salting.

That's a gross exaggeration. Coastal regions, including S. Florida, put a *lot* of salt into cars and cause a lot of corrosion. Particularly pre-90s cars.

Anyone know what the GT Maxtour tire is?

A local dealer is trying to encourage me to buy this tire ($489 including all installation charges). But I've never heard of this tire. It's allegedly a Goodyear brand but info on it is scarce.

The FR721 was $71 in P235/75R15 (bigger than my car needs) and that was only 4 years ago. Maybe $90 I could understand today but not 200.

What happened (trend-wise) that whitewalls are no longer in style? Years ago practically all cars has whitewall tires. Now hardly any do. Are people just lazy and they don't want to clean them? (True: those "tire shine" products do only that; they don't really CLEAN much of anything, certainly not a white wall).

All tires are required to have a manufacturers code molded/stamped into the sidewall somewhere. If it's made by Goodyear it will have the Goodyear code. Google and you should be able to find a list of codes. It's unlikely you'll find much info on these oddball "off-branded" tires. Goodyear probably makes that same tire under many different names for many different independent tire stores. I have bought these sorts of off-brand tires in the past and never had any particular problem, some have been quite good.