Tire Retreading Robots and Where ABB Fits

A truck tire with a worn tread can often go back on the road. Tire retreading strips the old tread off a sound casing and puts a new one on, keeping about 90 percent of the material for roughly a fifth of the material cost of a new tire. For most of its history people did the job by hand, at buffing machines and curing moulds. This post starts in the recap shops of the 1940s and follows the machines and franchises that came after them. It then looks at the robots now working in Continental's retread plant in Hanover, Michelin's new automated regrooving machine, and where ABB robots could help next.

A retreaded Pneumant tyre with the German word runderneuert, meaning retreaded, on its sidewall, 2021. Photo: BattKkk / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How recap shops rebuilt worn tires by hand

Retreading was an ordinary trade before the war. In 1939 Cook & Jackson in Mackay, Queensland, advertised all makes of new tyres and retreads from its white Art Deco shop, and in June 1942 the Recap Tire Corporation on Georgia Avenue in Washington, D.C., displayed retreaded tires in its window. A recapper inspected each casing, removed the worn tread, applied fresh rubber and cured the tire in a mould, where the new tread was formed. Much of that work was done by hand, one tire at a time.

The window of the Recap Tire Corporation on Georgia Avenue, Washington, D.C., June 1942, with a Save Rubber poster. Photo: Marjory Collins / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Photos from the recapping shop at the Holabird ordnance depot in Baltimore, taken in May 1943, show the steps in detail. After a visual inspection, soldiers put each tire in a tire spreader to check it inside and out, using a probe to pull out nails. Once camelback rubber had been applied, the tire went into a mould and cured for about one hour and forty-five minutes before the soldiers lifted it out. A Berlin workshop photographed in 1946 used special machines to loosen the old tread, then coated the casing with rubber solution and laid on cushion gum.

A soldier uses a probe to pull a nail from a tire held in a tire spreader, in the recapping shop at Holabird ordnance depot, Baltimore, May 1943. Photo: Ann Rosener / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Two industrial methods grew out of this work. In mould cure, or hot retreading, raw rubber is applied to the buffed casing and the tread is formed in a mould, with a separate mould for each size and pattern. In pre-cure, a ready-made tread strip is fixed to the casing with cement, which suits more tire sizes. Bandag, founded in 1957 in Muscatine, Iowa, built a large network around retreading and had more than 900 franchised dealers when Bridgestone agreed to buy it in 2006. Inspection got better too: shearography now finds hidden damage, embedded debris and nails before a casing is accepted.

Soldiers lift a freshly cured tire out of its mould in the Holabird recapping shop, May 1943. Photo: Ann Rosener / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Handling robots, mobile robots and automated regrooving

Michelin's newest step toward automation went on show at the IAA Transportation fair in Hanover in September 2026. NAZCA automates regrooving, the job that lets a truck tire run to its legal wear limit before it is retreaded. A high-density laser scanner and algorithms adjust the cut depth across the whole width and circumference, because every tire's shape is different. Michelin says each job needs less than three minutes of a technician's time and could raise regrooving capacity by 30 to 50 percent. About twenty machines are in pilot tests in Europe, and a wider roll-out follows from 2027.

A worker at a machine in a Berlin vulcanising workshop, 1946, where special machines loosened the old tread from worn tires. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0711-503 / Erich O. Krueger / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Robots already work inside at least one retread plant. At Continental's ContiLifeCycle plant in Hanover-Stöcken, which has retreaded truck and bus tires since 2013, a handling robot moves each buffed casing to the tire-building machine, where it receives up to 18 kilograms of fresh rubber heated to about 100°C, and then sets the tire on a trolley. Since March 2025 seven autonomous mobile robots have moved those trolleys to the curing presses, where the roughly 75 kg tire is cured at 160°C. Before the robots arrived, workers moved tires with cranes and trolleys that weighed up to 250 kg with two tires on board.

An autonomous mobile robot carries a tire on a trolley to the curing press at Continental's ContiLifeCycle retread plant in Hanover. Photo: Continental

We found no ABB robot in a retread plant, so ABB's role here is a possibility, though the pieces exist. Buffing is a grinding job on parts that all differ, and ABB's RobotWare Machining FC lets a robot grind, polish or buff castings while holding a constant pressure between tool and workpiece. At Ancofer in Germany, Teqram's EasyGrinder cell, built around an ABB IRB 6700, scans each part with 3D vision and chooses the right grinding process by itself. For trolley runs like the ones Continental automated, ABB's Flexley Mover P604 AMR maps its own surroundings with Visual SLAM and positions itself to within 10 mm.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinds a round steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer in Germany. Photo: ABB

What robots still have to learn in a retread shop

Connecting the stations comes next. In Hanover the AMRs already take orders from Continental's digital order system, and NAZCA reads each tire with a laser before it cuts. A buffing robot could work the same way, scanning the casing, choosing a profile and then holding a steady pressure with force control, much as the EasyGrinder treats each steel part as a new job. Cells like this are normally planned and checked in RobotStudio before any hardware is ordered. New tires are a separate story, covered in our post on tire manufacturing robots.

The EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer, built around an ABB IRB 6700 that scans each part and picks its own grinding process. Photo: ABB

For people at home the benefit is mostly indirect. Retreads were seldom used on passenger cars by 2008, but buses, delivery trucks and aircraft still run on them. Every retread Michelin makes saves about 50 kg of raw material, and the US EPA estimated an oil saving of more than 75 percent compared with a new tire. In factories, Continental says each retread reuses up to 70 percent of the original tire, and its Hanover plant has turned out more than a million retreads since it opened. Similar solutions now run at other Continental tire plants, from Mount Vernon and Clinton to Púchov, Otrokovice, Hefei and Rayong.

ABB's Flexley Mover P604 autonomous mobile robot in a warehouse, the kind of vehicle that can run trolleys between stations. Photo: ABB

Skills and variety remain the hardest problems. Michelin says manual regrooving needs specialist know-how and brings ergonomic strain, and that the trade struggles to renew those skills. Casings arrive in many brands, sizes and states of wear, which is why NAZCA works from a catalogue of recipes and still needs its team to study special cases. Retreads also have an image problem: the US road safety agency NHTSA notes the public belief that truck retreads are less safe than new tires and is still researching it. Continental eased its robots in with a training programme, and staff even named them, including Iron Tread and Captain Cargo.

Mobile robots at Continental's Hanover retread plant carry names chosen by staff, such as Iron Tread, LifeCycle Commander and Captain Cargo. Photo: Continental

Innovation

AI solutions for effortless ABB robot control.

Automation

Robotics

ceojohntran@chatwithrobot.net

+84905311611

© 2025. All rights reserved.

qtran1215@gmail.com