You can pour a beer. You can pour a concrete driveway.
Now, if Richard Steinke has his way, it will not be long before you hear about pouring a tire.
Steinke, a Nevada businessman, says he has discovered a better way to make tires by pouring liquid polymers into a mold and letting it harden into a round shape, with properties equal to or exceeding those of rubber.
Finding a substitute for rubber as the primary component of an automobile tire is a challenge that has confounded chemical researchers for more than 50 years. Many tire companies have tried and given up.
Steinke said researchers at his company, Amerityre Corp. in Boulder City, Nev., have developed and tested a tire made of a special polyurethane mixture and are almost ready to take it to market.
The polyurethane tire, Steinke said, is safer, longer lasting and cheaper to make than a rubber tire. It is also recyclable and more environmentally friendly, he said.
He is inviting tire companies to buy the rights to his technology. Some tire companies say they are keeping an eye on Steinke’s progress.
“It’s kind of the Holy Grail of tires,” said Guy Edington, managing director of Kumho Tire Co.’s technical center in Akron. “We’ve been looking at it. Most tire companies have. But no one’s been successful yet.”
Raw materials, including rubber, represent about 50 percent of tiremaking costs.
Steinke said he has studied making a urethane tire for about 15 years and has hit some milestones. In April, the tires passed independent laboratory tests for Department of Transportation requirements for strength, speed, endurance and other specifications for pneumatic tires.
“I believe, absolutely, that urethane will replace rubber in all tires within the next 10 years,” said Rick Vannan, who retired in 2002 from Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. as director of advance product and process technology and is now a consultant to Amerityre.
Amerityre seeks to replace the traditional tire-making process, which involves mixing rubber with oils, carbon black, sulfur, pigments and other additives to create a hot, gummy compound that is rolled, blended, slit and glued to the other materials.
Instead of huge, multimillion-dollar factories, tires could be made in small, automated modules that could be set up near auto plants.
The urethane tires would last 20 to 30 percent longer. They would run cooler, meaning they would be less prone to fail. They wouldn’t throw a tread, because the tread and sidewall would be continuous material, not several compounds molded together.
Perhaps best of all, Vannan said, it could make the tires 15 to 20 percent cheaper than rubber tires, because they require less energy to build, can be manufactured with highly automated systems and result in less waste.
Amerityre’s manufacturing process appears fairly simple. Robotic machines place fabric plies, belts and beads into a mold. Then a machine pours the liquid polyurethane into the mold. Less than a minute later, a new tire comes out.
Such a conversion would carry a big price tag: $1.8 billion to build the modules and install the equipment. But investors will get on board once they see the outcome, he said.
Many large tire companies are saying little publicly about Amerityre’s technology. The Rubber Manufacturers Association does not sound alarmed by Amerityre.
“The idea of urethane tires has been kicked around for a lot of years. But it just hasn’t risen as a concern or issue for our members,” said Dan Zielinski, an association spokesman in Washington.
Some engineers say urethane has possibilities, if it can overcome a host of technical challenges. Urethane is used now in low-performance tires, such as lawn mowers, golf carts, bicycles, hand trucks and scooters.
But it is a tougher challenge to make a tire that would meet the demands of highway driving, including traction on a wide range of surfaces.
“If they can overcome those issues, they have a chance,” said Kumho’s Edington.
