When rotating tires from front to rear, should you also swap sides, such as

Front Right moves to Rear Left
Front Left moves to Rear Right

and vice versa; just checking before I go do it out in the frigid cold...

 

if the wear is pretty even side to side, or your NOT running any really negative camber, then front/back is fine.....and some tires are directional, some wheels are directional, so you may only be able to do it that way

some people will x them to the front them bring the front straight back but unless the difference in the front and rear camber is considerable, there is no point to do this

 

Generally if you arent doing 5 tires, you should just do front to back and back to front.

 

unless you have wear on the inner portion due to really negative camber settings, a lot of OEM setups use -1.5 degrees in the rear and near 0 up front (xr4ti) and if you dono't x the back to the front and then bring the front straight back every time then you're lucky to get 10K miles from a set of tires.....when x'd to the front, it forces them to smooth out what has been chopped up by the rear alignment settings....and better yet, if you flip the tire on the rim, it will last much longer......

there are a lot of setups like this though...most are RWD and most are sports cars or something near that.....audi, bmw, subaru, all benefit from x'ing the tires

 

I would never swap from side to side.
I only rotate from front to back.

 

When you guys rotate the tires, do you just jack up one side of the car from the middle? Or do you jack up both the front and back?

 

Jack and 1 jack stand to support at each end.

 

All the summer and winter tires I have ever bought have had directional treads so you cannot switch sides.

 

I have pretty low profile tires, so my stock jack on the front jackpoint can jack it up high enough(barely) to switch out both front and rear tires on that side.

 

Tire profile does not matter. It is the amount of travel your suspension allows before the tire lifts off the ground.

There is far less travel in the rear beam so if you jack up the front high enough, you can get the rear to lift.

 

Now, when you guys are saying front jack point, are you talking about the jack point in the front center of the car, right below the engine, or are you talking about the jack points on the side of the car, near drive side door.

 

Side of the car.

Always have the car sitting on four support points when working on it (eg. one jack stand, 3 wheels or two jack stands and two wheels) Three support points is unstable if you have to wrestle with the wheel at all.

 

I always rotated my tires by bringing the rears straight forward and crossing the fronts only to the rear.

I don't have directionals so this is how I've always done them. It was in the manual to my first car ('87 Trans Am) and the habit has stuck with me.