My tires are cupping/feathering on the inside edges and I'd like to determine the cause before I replace them. All tires exhibit the problem but I rotate them front to back fairly often so that muddies things a bit. One of the front hubs had some vertical play so I replaced it, but its not obvious to me that this could cause the cupping.

I usually think of bad shocks/struts causing this kind of wear but there is no visible physical damage and they seem to ride ok to me. However, they have 169k miles on them and I can be fooled by slow failures.

One of the rear rotors is likely warped but I've never heard of this causing any tire wear issues. I hope to check the run-out this weekend.

If it matters, these are old snow tires that are past their useful winter life and are being abused through the summer simply to delay replacing my summer tires which are also past their useful life :-)

 

see
http://www.procarcare.com/includes/c...dtirewear.html

Look at the illustrations to confirm your problem and what the cause may be.

Rotating good tires to the bad axle will make all the tires look bad.

 

Thanks for the nice illustration. I have the cupping on all four tires, not the feathering. The consistency of the cupping between the left and right sides is surprising to me (since I rotate front to back) but suspension problems seem to have a way of propagating damage. The front hub I replaced seems the likely culprit then, but I wish I could rule out anything else before installing a fresh set of tires.