Hello my friends, hope you are doing well. Today, I have a simple DIY for those of you who’re wanting to do your own maintenance and who also like inexpensive, but effective, tools and gear. It’s also something that can help improve, or at least maintain, your vehicle’s safety, so based on that alone, what’s not to like?
What I’m going to show you today is how to quickly, easily, and accurately measure the tread depth on your tires. Why would you want to do such a thing? Simple – your tires are the most important part of your car. They are singularly responsible for how well you can accelerate, stop, and turn your vehicle, and unless they are in proper working condition, your safety and your ability to control your car can/will be severely diminished. At best, you could just bang up your car a bit, and at worst, you could severely injure or kill both yourself and others around you as well. I will say it once, and strongly – don’t ever cheap out or compromise on the quality of the rubber you put on your car, and don’t fuck around with or blow off simple tire maintenance because you get lazy or complacent. It’s literally a life and death item, so take it seriously.
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to measuring! To do it correctly and most accurately, you’ll need just one item: a tire tread depth gauge. These are easily obtainable at nearly every auto parts store, or like the one I bought, online from various vendors. I picked mine up on Amazon for less than $10 USD. Of course, like anything, nothing is as simple as it seems, and with gauges you’ll find a myriad of styles and price points. Nearly of them will do the trick just fine, but I find that a simple mechanical dial gauge like the one pictured above works the best. If you want one just like it, you’ll find a million of them on Amazon and for a million different prices. One bit of warning, you’ll see the same meter go from around $8 like the one I got, to all the way up to $35+ for a Snap On branded gauge. Every single one is identical apart from the branding and color, and comes from the same factory, so pick the cheapest one you can find like I did. Also, ideally, pick one that reads in 1/32″, unless you live in a metric country and are more comfortable with that. They all work the same.
Alright, enough foreplay, let’s get into the action. These things are stupid easy to use. The first thing you need to do is to press down the long shaft that sticks out of the top of the gauge.
Once you do, that will extend the measuring probe out of the bottom. Be careful not to bend it or your gauge is history.
Next comes the measuring. Simply orient the gauge so that the probe enters one of the grooves on your tire and then press the body of the gauge down until it stops and rests on the face of the tire.
Lastly, very carefully raise and remove the gauge from the tire and take a look at the dial on the face of the gauge. The needle will point to the measured number of 1/32″ or 1mm increments that equal the tread depth of your tire. On the image below, my tread depth is reading at just under 8/32″ which is still quite deep and indicates more than enough life left in the tire. As a rule, for normal all-season and summer performance tires, you never want to go below 2/32″ or 2mm as at that point the tire doesn’t have enough tread left on it to effectively evacuate any water that you’d come across while driving say in the rain or through random puddles. That means that you can hydroplane and lose control of the car extremely easily, and that would suck. For winter tires, you generally don’t want to go less than 5/32″ or 4mm in order to maintain strong effectiveness in snow and slush. Handily, if you think you’ll have a hard time trying to remember these figures, the dial gauges like the one I bought all have a color-coded scale on their dial that shows you whether or not the measured tread depth is good or bad – if it’s in the green range, at least for normal tires, then you’re good; if it’s in the yellow, you should change them very soon; and if it’s in the red, then you need to replace them immediately in order to maintain safe operation of your car. Easy-peasy, right? Yup, anyone can do it. Also, to get a really good idea of your tire wear, I would recommend taking repeated readings at various areas of the tire as tires can wear differently in different places – i.e. I would measure the inner, middle, and outer tread regions on a tire as depending on your alignment, inflation, etc. you can wear the tire unevenly and while one area may read OK, another may be at the minimum or less and necessitate replacing the tire. Always err on the side of safety, and not cost; replace your tires if they need it, because death sucks.
And that’s that. Like I said, simple, cheap, and it could potentially save your life or your car’s beautiful body and wheels. That’s a win no matter how you look at it.