Inner driver's side tire wear

[Bluebird]

Hi all,

Rotated the tires on the 16 GT and noticed excess wear on the inside of the driver's side tire. The other three tires appeared to wear evenly.
Aside from taking it to an alignment place is there anything I can do to alleviate the uneven wear problem?
Tires get rotated (by me) every 5000 miles, or so, back to front (same side) and fronts to opposite rear. This is the second set of tires on the vehicle, the first set made it to about 32000 miles, the car now has 73000 miles.

Besides that, all is well.

Thanks.

 

[yrwei52]

Hi all,

Rotated the tires on the 16 GT and noticed excess wear on the inside of the driver's side tire. The other three tires appeared to wear evenly.
Aside from taking it to an alignment place is there anything I can do to alleviate the uneven wear problem?
Tires get rotated (by me) every 5000 miles, or so, back to front (same side) and fronts to opposite rear. This is the second set of tires on the vehicle, the first set made it to about 32000 miles, the car now has 73000 miles.

Besides that, all is well.

Thanks.

Looks like the tire rotation you’re doing is different from Mazda’s recommendation.

If you rotate tires every 5K miles, and you didn’t see such excessive wear on inner tread at left-front tire 5K miles ago, something has happened on your left-front suspension during the period. You may hit a pothole, or the curb very hard which caused severe camber change. You definitely need to get a 4-wheel alignment done to verify the camber change at a reputable shop getting a print-out before and after. Unfortunately there’s no camber adjustment on front suspension for CX-5, unless you’ve installed an aftermarket lower control arm with camber adjustment. The fix for your problem could be expensive by replacing damaged suspension parts to bring the camber back within specs.

 

[ceric]

My two cents ...

With directional tires, I only rotate front<->rear, not side to side.
That said, front tires usually wear more on the outer side.
Most cars have negative camper on the rear. Hence, it wears on the inner side.
Front to back rotation keeps them evenly worn.

As yrwei52 said, if one of the tires shows uneven wear, and much more so than the other three. You should have the alignment checked.

 

[Bluebird]

Looks like I went back to front instead of front to back same side. Same with the others that go diagonally. That shouldn't make too much difference if I do it the same each time.

 

[madar]

Looks like I went back to front instead of front to back same side. Same with the others that go diagonally. That shouldn't make too much difference if I do it the same each time.

You're right. It's odd there's no wear from the other tires. If you have a bad alignment, the other tires will show wear where the specs are out. Could be just a bad tire, but alignment is the first thing to check.