Beware of Goodyear Silent Armours! After reading a few posts and a few hours researching online, I decided to replace my stock ATS's with Goodyear Silent Armours...275x65x18(04 FX4). Everything I read was positive, great treadwear, very quiet, great traction. Prior to purchasing, I came upon a post on here with comments about problems balancing the tire...not unusual to have a bad apple in a bushel, Im ok with that. Well, I had them mounted, and 2k miles later, I began noticing a shake at highway speeds. Took it to the dealership today to have the balance checked and they told me they would need to be replaced. All 4 were tested for road pressure(1 passed-within limits) and the results were way off. The guy told me in order to get them properly balanced, it would take a crazy amount of weight. Fortunately, they ordered me 4 new ones, but now Im kicking myself for ignoring what I read on here. I got 82k out of the ATS but was unimpressed by the wet/snow traction. I need to find a comparable tire with better traction...maybe Revos or something comparable...Im not going back to the Silent Armours. Any advice? I dont want a real aggressive tread.

 

First you said you heard all positive reviews......then you said you are kicking yourself for ignoring everything I heard on here......huh, what were you ignoring, good reviews? Yeah sometimes you get a lemon, hate that it happened to you, but look around it is a solid tire with many many thousands of miles of great reviews.

 

Im kicking myself for ignoring the "negative" post on here. I agree, there are many positive comments around, but Im thinking I should stick with an LT tire and not risk it. Darn lemons!

 

Do you kick yourself for buying a Ford because you ignored some negative posts here. You can have bad products from anything. And in tires, it seems the larger they are, the better chance of having a bad one.

 

Mine have been fine, really fine. I've put almost 20k km's on em over 13 months and no problems. Sorry about the bad balancing, sometimes it's the jerk off who can't balance them, had that fiasco before.

 

heres the tires i had on my explorer.

Mastercraft Courser MT's 40k and barely worrn. a bit noisy but damn they could grab. set of 4 31x9.5x16 at local shop ran me about 800$ mounted.

 

I Love my silent armor tires had them for about 7K now not a single problem with em.

 

People say BFG AT's have balancing problems too, again, it could be 1 faulty tire or a bad balance job. I left a rebalance, a block away threw a weight off, after I got home, 1-2 more were missing. I had a bunch of problems and this was the 5th time back because of the weights bieng chucked. Now, I count and write down how many on each wheel inner and outer because I was called a liar. I have chips taken out of my doors that these weights caused.

For another good recommendation for a not as aggressive tread, but really good in snow and rain, the Michelin LTX M/S. I don't find Toyo AT's overly aggressive either.

 

In tire manufacturing there are strict quality control standards. Only 1% tolerance is acceptable in the end result of tire manufdacturing because it requires a quality check. I have not had problems with my Silent Armors. They are great! Already used 50,000 miles on them and think can strech it out to 60,000 miles.
But remember because you bought a bad set of tires does not mean they are all bad. Manufacturers do not check every tire on the line. They take random samples to check if the tires are within specifications.
Now the stock tire my 04 came with, the Continental Contitracs, now those were pieces of krud! They would chip off the rubber easily. And they did not las long at all. I only got about 30,000 before I noticed I was starting to lose traction.

 

I traded out GoodYear Wrangers for GY SilentArmors on a small sport ute and (you guessed it), here are the pro's and con's:

PRO's:
GREAT improvement in ride smoothness (potholes didn't jar my teeth loose any more)
MEDIUM decrease in road noise.
GREAT improvement in wet and dry road traction.
MEDIUM improvement in traction on loose stuff (gravel, mud)
GREAT look when cleaned up. (Meguiar's tire dressing gel is good stuff for this!)
GREAT treadlife (Kevlar sidewalls are tough as nails to boot for the offroaders)

CON's:
DECREASED MPG (The SilentArmor is more "pliable" to soak up bumps but this decreased MPG 1-2MPG as compared to the "rock hard" Wrangers.) This was on a car that got 22MPG city usually and it dropped down to 20-21MPG immediately!
MODERATELY pricey for tires (but you get what you pay for for sure for great traction, treadlife and ride. Just know that you're going to be paying a little extra for that smooth ride in MPG.)

I'll also add that GoodYear service center I used was EXCELLENT to work with. They actually helped me go to bat with corporate to swap for only the cost of mounting/balancing because the Wranglers had such awful wet and dry traction. I swapped the Wranglers out in the first 500 and had zero issues with over 14K miles on the SilentArmors so far.

 

Pros & cons.......there are good & bad.My GY Wrangler AT's have 36k miles on them;no problems. A Ford owner I know who works at Michelin says Michelin has a good opinion of Silent Armor.
Ya pays ur money & takes ya chance.

 

That's the jest of it. Also depends on what your using you tires for. Many put an off road tire on and never take it off road. As a group, AT tires are a compromise at most. You can't have the best tire for off road and a perfect street tire mounted on the same wheel.

Like was said, a good off road tire has to be pliable and get good traction. That hurts your handling on the street as well as fuel mileage. But put a great street tire on a 4x4 and you won't make it 10 feet off the pavement. And there is the type of soil your driving in. Sandy soil needs wide tires for flotation, while a snow tire would need to be narrow. A good mud tire needs shovels for tread.

Bad luck you got a set of tires that would not balance. Try it again and hopefully it will be ok.

Good luck.

 

Did you level your truck or lift it? I really like the way it looks and wanna change mine up. I'm driving a stock 2004 supercrew with 265 70/17 silent armors.

-alex

 

I picked up the GY Wrangler Silent Armour for my 2001 F-150 SCrew last year and I was very happy with them. Reduced road noise, smoother ride, and handled much better than OEMs...think they were BFGoodrich. Had them for about a year and never had any problems.

Was so pleased with those tires, that I picked up the GY Fortera TripleTread for my wife's Honda Pilot. Real dissapointed with those tires. Much louder and rougher ride than OEMs, but they do have much better wet, dry, and snow traction.