Why is it bad to rotate tyres incorrectly on AWD cars?

[joeblow]

Also any tricks anybody might have for doing this with a single jack would be appreciated. This morning I borrowed the jack from my Chevy work van so I could have both wheels off on one side but this would become trickier with the cross-rotation.

 

Get some jack stands. Its a bad idea to not have some kind of support for your jack anyway in case of failure, especially when you have two or more wheels off.

 

Any hardware or autoparts store will carry 2 ton jack stands for like $20/set. Raise one side, slide stands under, drop jack, repeat on the other side. You can raise the front, then the back instead of side to side, its up to you. Just mark the tires so you know which one came from which corner.

[vr4Legacy]

^^ Or use the spare tire. It takes one extra step to rotate , but if you start with the Rear Right (rr) with the spare, then move that tire to FR, then back to RL, then to FR and back to RR to finish.

[ehsnils]

Easy. Rear biased center diff, more power than stock, heavy on the gas in tight turns wagging out the back = more wear on the rear than the front.

 

It's not typical, but it could happen. I'm stage 2 and do it occassionally, but you'd have to do it a lot to see more wear on the rear than the front.

 

Braking is performed only under a short period of time during the lifetime of a tire and often relatively mildly. If you are on the track the wear through braking will make a difference.

 

For a daily driver wear is more depending on correct alignment and transfer of power. Driven wheels are experiencing some slippage all the time causing them to wear faster. This can be seen on RWD cars in the long run.

 

However it also depends on if you are doing highway driving or city driving how prominent the wear difference is. But FWD cars wears heavily on the front tires both during driving and braking.

[Subadozer]

Get some jack stands. Its a bad idea to not have some kind of support for your jack anyway in case of failure, especially when you have two or more wheels off.

Well duh. I have a pair of jack stands and just didn't think of using them.

 

Since I've now done the first rotation just exchanging front and back should I just stick with this scenario or would it be OK to change to the cross-rotation scheme next time and then stay with that plan from then on?