by spencerforhire » Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:23 am
I really like the 70's Z/28 steel 5-spoke wheels and have gathered up 8 of them and I have a plan. I'm thinking about modifying a set to get them to fit on my Vega wagon project. What I want to end up with is a pair of 6" wide ones for the front with around 3.5" to 3.75" BS and a pair of 8" for the rear with 4.5" to 4.75" BS. The simplest way to do this would be to carefully cut on a lathe the welds holding the centers into the hoops and then transfer the centers to another set of donor hoops(6" ones are easy to find, 8" would come from Corvette or GM truck rallys that I have lots of). This would allow the back spacing to be custom tailored to the car. The OEM trim rings for these wheels are only about an inch deep and only show the flat lip, so the rear ones might require a non-stock trim ring to hide the offset.
Another possibility would be to split the hoops on two pairs; each pair in a different places an inch apart, allowing the back halves to be swapped around to make one pair wider than the other when they're welded back together. This method would result in 4 wheels that look the same from the outside, but no doubt require spacers on the rear(or a wider than stock rear end) to take up the extra back space.
The "fleet"-
72 Vega HB Drag Car -383/'Glide/9"(9.35@146.19)(5.94@117.28 1/8th)
77 Vega Estate wagon- project(someday)will have TPI305/T-5, S-10 spindles/axles
76 Vega GT- 400/4spd/9" retired from active duty(rusty)
06 Silverado 2WD ex.cab daily
03 Silverado 2WD ex.cab (retired)
06 Haulin' 20ft enclosed car transporter
06 GMC Canyon Shop truck
07 Colorado project( 5.3 4L60e swap)
99 Saturn SL1- wife's car
01 Saturn SC2- son's project
07 Saturn Ion Redline project
and 4 more Saturn "parts cars"
Note- the very act of listing all of these has made me realize I have some kind of problem.....
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