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Purpose of Rubber Hairs on Tyres: Everything You Need to Know

Have you ever noticed those teeny-tiny little rubber hairs sticking out from fresh tyres? They look like some type of kinked anomaly or even something wrong with your tyre. However, when it comes down to manufacturing the tyre, they hold a purpose and are a pretty excellent indicator that it is fresh and new in production.

What Are Rubber Hairs on Tyres?

Several names have referred to small, thin projections on the new tyres. These include rubber hairs, vent spews, or sprue nubs. These small, thin projections belong to the leftover tyre manufacturing parts. They are part of what happens during moulding as part of manufacturing the product.

How are Tyres Manufactured?

Understand the purpose of these rubber hairs and how tyres are made. Modern tyres are created through a process in which many layers of rubber, fabric, and steel are used. The raw material is given form in terms of tyre shape using a mould: a large, hollow metal form that provides a tyre with its ultimate shape, tread pattern, and size.

Here is how one would sum up the process as conveniently as possible:

They mix in the various chemicals to create the rubber compound required for the type of tyre, which is mixed in different proportions depending on the chemical from which the tyre derives strength, flexibility, or grip.

  • Tyre Building: Tyre building is built up step by step in layers. The first layer is the tyre’s body, made of diverse fabric and rubber compounds, followed by tread, sidewall and bead.
  • Vulcanization: The tyre is placed in tyre mould after constructing the tyre, where it gets vulcanized. Vulcanization is the process where the rubber is chemically bonded under heated and pressurized conditions to make the tyre solid and flexible with rubber hairs.

Formation of Rubber Hairs

In vulcanization, the tyre is pressed into a mould with a lot of tiny holes. These are essential vent holes since air and excess rubber are expelled while the tyre is still forming. Without such vents, air might be trapped within the tyres and hence cause imperfections, inconsistency, or even weak points.

Why do Tyres Have Rubber Hairs?

A Primary Goal of Rubber Hairs

The primary purpose of rubber hairs is not to perform a job but rather to ensure that the tyre is correctly manufactured. The following shows why they exist:

  • To Prevent Trapping Air
    The most critical reason that tyres contain rubber hairs is that air bubbles cannot get trapped inside the mould during vulcanization. Bubbles of air trapped in the tyre may lead to weak spots, resulting in failure or inconsistent performance long before their average lifetime has been exhausted.
  • Quality Control in Tyre Production
    The rubber fibres also indicate that the tyre has experienced the right stage of formation in the mould. As long as it’s long enough that the small rubber lumps are visible, then it becomes apparent that the tyre was thoroughly pressed into the mould, and therefore, large air pockets or other defects could not happen while producing that particular tyre.
  • Uniformity
    The rubber hairs help ensure that the tyre’s tread pattern is evenly formed by allowing air to escape from it. If there are no vent holes, some areas of the tread might not even, implying that there would be poor traction and uneven wear over time.

Do Rubber Hairs Impact Tyre Performance?

They don’t affect the tyre’s performance at all. It is a manufacturing by-product and harmless. In time, the rubber hairs will disappear as the tyre will wear them off when it is in contact with the road. The hairs disappear in most cases after running several hundred miles.

Are Rubber Hairs Something that You Can Take Out?

Some other people shave off the rubber hairs just on cosmetic grounds, mainly due to their unsightly appearance. Although they can be trimmed off delicately, it is not essential because they will naturally wear off over time through everyday driving.

Rubber Hairs as an Indicator of a New Tyre

New tyres generally have rubber hairs, showing that the tyre has never been used. Consumers can rely on rubber hairs to indicate that the tyre was just manufactured. Watching the rubber hairs when buying new tyres makes a consumer slightly sure that the tyre did not stay in the warehouse for long before purchase.

Do All Tyres Have Hair?

Most tyres contain rubber hairs, especially on a new tyre, but these may vary in quantity and extent. Variations in the moulding technique may result in variations between different tyre manufacturers, making some tyres look slightly different from others in the size and number of rubber hairs. Some high-performance or specialty tyres may have fewer visible rubber hairs as the various aspects of their moulding may cause this difference.

Car Tyres: Most car tyres have visible rubber hairs at purchase. The hairs wear away within a short period with the use of the vehicle.

  • Bike Tyres: Such tyres also mainly possess rubber hairs, but because they touch the road with a smaller area as opposed to car tyres, the hairs may wear out much more slowly.
  • Bicycle Tyres: Bicycle tyres are primarily worn out with visible rubber hairs, mainly because of their lightweight and small sizes.

Do Rubber Hairs Show Tyre Quality?

The rubber hairs themselves don’t tell much about the quality of a tyre. They are just leftovers of the tyre-moulding process. This doesn’t necessarily mean a thing, though. Still, their existence does tell about it having been moulded into the tyre properly – which is essential for structural and physical equality in the construction of the tyre.

Various factors decide the quality of tyres, such as rubber compounds used, tread design, and internal construction of the tyre. Also, the manufacturing process itself goes a long way in deciding its quality. Rubber hairs are not an indicator of high quality, but their presence indicates that the tyre has been moulded using the exact technique.

Conclusion

Rubber hairs on the sides of tyres look pretty bizarre, but they play a vital role in establishing the quality of that tyre during its production process. These vents spew clear the air stuck within the tyres, making them all uniformly set up to work efficiently on the road. They don’t impact the function or safety performance of the tyre, but their mere presence can give the meaning to the visual that the tyre is new and just manufactured. It smoothes out when you drive since the rubber hairs wear away, thus giving your tyres a smooth surface ready to hit the road.

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