"Effective offset" spacer question...

Not that I'm immediately planning on going out and doing this, but I've had an idea rattling around in my head and I'm wondering what the actual associated load change on the wheel bearings would be...

I've always loved the look of "rally" style wheels, but rally style wheels rarely (if ever) come in 6 lug. The vast majority of the market is 4-5 lug only- so if you want something like a Sparco Terra you aren't going to find them in 6 lug because Sparco/OZ simply does not make them in the 6 lug application.:

(looks cool with KO2s on a Subaru by the way )

Enter hub adapters.


Adapters by their very nature are pretty thick spacers, and depending on who you ask spacers are the devil. The argument is that by changing your wheel and tire geometry you are putting greater strain on the wheel bearings.

However, here's the thing. Most cars that would mount these rally wheels start with a positive offset of like 30-40mm... stock Tacoma wheels (at least on my 3rd gen) are 0 offset. The net change then is that positive offset would start to make up for the thickness of the spacer in terms of keeping the center line of the wheel where it normally is stock.

So... would that hurt anything to work out the exact thickness of the hub adapter and then buy a wheel offset that corresponds? Or, at the very least makes up for most of it such that your net change is a few mm in one direction or another?

I know this is a question that usually wouldn't come up because adding a spacer and then changing your offset to negate the spacer would be silly, but in this case the spacer is a necessary part of adapting your truck to take the different wheels.

Ultimately your tire would essentially be in the same exact location as stock, just the geometry of the wheel holding it on would be... sort of different?

 

man i'm sad no one replied to this... i'm throwing around the idea of putting these on my 2nd gen 5 lug and i can't find a picture of them on any, but i want to see what they would look like....

 

5 lug to 5 lug you'd still probably need to run a spacer to adjust the offset.

Since I posted this I have talked to a few people about this and the general consensus is "no that won't hurt anything" for the reasons I was listing. It complicates servicing rotors and you would want to loctite the inner studs down, but, as long as that centerline of the wheel gets matched properly you won't see any adverse effects.

Just, don't by the cheapest shittiest adapters you can find.

 

Evo Corse Dakar not quite what you are looking for?

 

I like the idea. I asked the same question a while back about some Jeep Rubicon wheels I have laying around and never really got any useful information.

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/rubicon-wheels-on-a-tacoma.630332/


Edit: Plenty of Jeep folks are adapting JK wheels onto older TJ wranglers so I don’t really see the difference.

 

the stock wheels on my 3rd gen TRD OR aren't 0 offset. what tacoma wheels are you talking about?

 

those are nice looking wheels. i think they're about 3 or 4 times the price of the Terras.

(zombie thread, i know.)

 

In theory it shouldn’t cause you any issues. I would be concerned about brake clearance and also the nuts that hold the adapter to the hub. That nut, to me, would be the weak link. On my old Tacoma I bought the extended spacer nuts from All Pro. They catch more thread than the nuts that came with my spacers.