Purcell Retread Plant in Portland, OR

It retreads and repairs casings in eight categories: commercial truck, agricultural, OTR, industrial, light truck, passenger, trailer, and UTV and ATV. Tracks are not retreaded at any Purcell plant, so a worn set is replaced.

Nothing is sold here and no vehicles are serviced. For tires and service in the Pacific Northwest, the nearest Purcell stores are in Washington: Lacey, Monroe and Renton.

Portland is where casings from the three Washington stores are retreaded, which for a fleet running the I-5 corridor is a short haul rather than a cross-country one. That distance matters: casings are heavy, and shipping them a long way erodes the saving that makes retreading worth doing.

It is also the Purcell plant nearest Alaska, where no location offers retreading. If you run equipment in Alaska and want casings in the program, the Alaska store you deal with can explain how that works for your account.

Inspection, and what happened before it arrived. Three things end casings, and all three are avoidable:

• Running a tire flat, which usually finishes the casing in a short distance.
• Unrepaired damage, which works through the casing over time.
• Chronic under-inflation, which builds heat and breaks the casing down internally where nobody can see it.

For a fleet, the number worth knowing is what proportion of your casings is currently passing. A low rate points at how tires are being run rather than at the tires themselves.

The plant repairs casings as well as retreading them, and the two are different decisions.

A casing with an injury can often be repaired and put back into service without a retread, and on a large tire that is frequently the right answer rather than the cheap one. Whether a particular injury is repairable depends on its size, where it sits and whether it has reached the casing body, which is a judgment made with the tire in front of you rather than over the phone.

The practical point for a fleet: do not scrap a damaged tire on sight. Send it for inspection and let the result decide. A tire written off in a yard is a decision made without the information.