How often should you rotate tires on a Ural? Should you rotate them at all? Three tires on a Ural Patrol are interchangeable (since the front tire has disc brakes instead of drum brakes, it cannot be swapped with the other tires):

• Sidecar tire
• Spare tire
• Rear tire

The rear tire of a Ural will wear out faster than the others. But you don’t need to do a bunch of rotation to keep wear even. On the IMZ-Ural Discussion Boards, Bill Glaser of myural.com has a solid recommendation — leave the sidecar tire alone, and occasionally swap the spare and rear tires:

I just swap the spare and pusher so that they “fit” the shoes and put a new tire on the “spare”. I leave all the other wheels in place and just change the tires as needed. There is no benefit to rotating any of the wheels to different positions. Whether you leave them or rotate, your wear mileage will be the same. It is less work to just rotate the spare and pusher. You will get 3 times the pusher mileage on the front and the sidecar tire will probably dry rot before it goes bald unless you are hauling a huge amount of weight in the hack.

How often you swap your tires is up to you, how you ride, and what tires you have. Check your Ural’s manual for the manufacturer’s recommendations on checking tire tread and wear, and that should give you a good guideline. (At the least, that’s what I’m planning on doing to gauge when I’ll swap my rear and spare tires.)

When swapping tires, it’ll help to do some braking exercises to re-fit the brakes around the different drum. Again from Bill:

Any time you switch a wheel from one position to another (drum brake) you will lose braking efficiency for a time until the shoes wear into the drum. Generally, it is best to leave the wheel in the same position unless you don’t mind spongy brakes.

See the whole discussion: IMZ-Ural Discussion Boards - Tire Wear