Brother, We're Retreading

The rationing of new tires announced by OPA last week was a blessing and a boon to some 4,500 little businessmen. For years the poor relation and black sheep of the U.S. rubber industry, the retreading business has suddenly become the white hope of U.S. car owners.

Said Cleveland's Roy Snyder, 15 years a retreader: "The rush is on. It's like the Klondike. No use answering my phone. I can't handle the business." Retreaders throughout the U.S. said the same. Equally unfamiliar to them was the new type of clientele: chauffeurs instead of truck drivers, Honest John Citizen instead of used-car auctioneers.

Taking their ethics from their customers (jalopy dealers care chiefly for looks and price) some retreaders had used inferior rubber, put it on with substandard equipment. Yet they always had an important economic function, too. Fleet owners, taxi and trucking companies know that retreads cost only half as much as new tires (they use only 40% as much rubber) and give 75-80% as much wear. Moreover, a good tire may be renewed more than once. Fleet business had made a few retread concerns profitable long before the war. But war means a boom for all 4,500 of them -- as long as they can get equipment and supplies. A retreader's equipment: 5- $6,000 worth of molds and buffing machinery. Chief material: camelback, an uncured rubber compound of the same ingredients that go into new tires.

If a car owner comes in before his tires are too badly worn, they can be simply recapped: their surface roughened, cement applied, a strip of camelback molded and vulcanized over it. Retreading costs more (about $7 for a 6-by-16 tire, or about half the price of a new tire) than recapping, /- and uses more rubber, since the old top rubber, worn too thin for roughening, must be cut and buffed away. The camelback is then applied to the naked carcass. Even for a good retread job the tire must have some rubber on it.

First little businessmen to get a real break since priorities, the retreaders last week saw but two clouds on the horizon:

Equipment. About 15,000 molds are scattered throughout the U.S., most of them in good condition. Manufactured by such concerns as James C. Heintz & Co., of Cleveland, and Super Mold Corp., of Lodi, Calif., they need aluminum and iron for matrixes which form the treads in the molds. Production this year zoomed 60 to 100%, seems doomed to level off sharply unless priorities are granted.

Rubber. This year the tire companies made 65,000,000 new tires, sold retreaders 30,000 tons of camelback for 8,000,000 retread jobs. For 1942, retreaders have set a goal of 20,000,000 jobs requiring 80,000 tons of camelback. OPM has promised allocation of enough rubber to satisfy all defense retread needs, but trucks and busses are likely to get theirs first.

/- Neither retreading nor recapping is to be confused with regrooving. This merely cuts new treads (for safety) in a tire worn smooth. No new rubber is added, nor is the life of the tire prolonged.

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