Purcell Tire & Service in Lacey, WA

Alignment on everything. Heavy-duty truck alignment for the tractor, trailer alignment for what it pulls, and car and light truck alignment for the pickups that follow the job around.

Tires and what goes with them. Tire and wheel balancing, wheel refurbishing and retreading through the Purcell program.

Equipment. OTR services, covering fitting, change-outs and repairs on the tires under loaders, haul trucks and graders.

The account and the emergency. Fleet services holds the specifications and the schedule; 24-hour roadside assistance deals with the unit that did not keep to it.

Work in this part of the state takes vehicles off pavement more often than a highway fleet expects: forestry tracks, gravel, construction access and wet unsealed surfaces.

Two consequences show up in the tires. The first is cuts and punctures from embedded material, which are repairable when they are caught and fatal to a casing when they are not. The second is a wear pattern that looks like alignment but is sometimes just the surface, which is why reading the old tires before fitting new ones is worth the minute it takes.

If a tire has taken damage, have it looked at rather than waiting to see. A repairable injury left alone becomes a scrapped casing, and the casing is the part worth protecting.

Casings collected here go to the Purcell retread plant in Portland, Oregon, the nearest of the seven and a short haul by the standards of this network.

That distance matters more than it sounds. Casings are heavy, and shipping them a long way erodes the saving that makes retreading worth doing at all. A fleet on this corridor is in one of the better positions in the country for it. See retreading.