I've got a 71 Skylark convertible, and am about to pull the trigger on a new set of wheels. Call it pro touring or whatever, but I want maximum tire and wheel widths on the car. The wheels I'm looking at are 18 x 9.5 with -4mm offset (5.09" backspacing) at all 4 corners, no staggered setup for me. Through the searching I've done on here, it should fit the rear fine, but I'm more worried about the front rubbing. The closest I saw was someone running 9.5" wide with +6 offset all around with no issues, which is about 10mm further sucked in. Any help is greatly appreciated, looking to pull the trigger in the next week or so.
In the rear you should have no problem at all...you could even go X11....not sure about about front. I have it X8 in the front and X9 in the back, and the most I'd go is X8.5 in the front, in regards to backspacing...X9.5 backspace should be 5.5
with 9.5 up front you'd want something more like 5.5 bs 5.75bs if you wanted to play it safe 11in you'd neeed 6.25 bs if you wanted to go wider in back ---------- Post added at 08:01 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:54 PM ----------
I too am considering installing 9.5" wide wheels front and rear on my 71 GS. With a backspacing of 5.5" and a offset of 6mm, will it work for my application front and rear?
I would go with a 5.375" backspace on a 9.5" wide rim and that should be perfectly centered. However if you if you had a tight fit with the 5.5" backspace you could add a thin spacer between the rim and axle to centre the rim and give you the 5.375" backspace. This is based off my car. I have a 15X10 wheel with a 5.5" backspace and the wheel is about 1/8" closer to the outer fender vs the inside. So 5.625" is the perfect backspace for a 10 inch rim. So if you use a 1/2" narrower rim then you need 0.25" less backspace to centre the rim in the wheel well. ---------- Post added at 02:30 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:27 PM ---------- See my above post, you will not have enough backspace with the 5.09" in order to centre the tire in the wheel well and max the tire size. As a rule of thumb always go with slightly move backspace than what you desire if you can not get exactly what you want. Then you can add a thin spacer to get the wheel where you need it. 5.375" backspace should be perfect.
