You are currently viewing Pros and Cons of Wheel spacers

Pros and Cons of Wheel spacers

Image source: lmr.com

Wheel spacers are commonly used when fixing large tires in a vehicle. They create an extra clearance distance between the wheel and its wheel hub assembly. Some people’s thick wheel spacers cause some problems to your car. This article will provide you with the pros and cons of using wheel spacers to help make the right decision.

 

Pros:

1. Increase vehicle performance: Wheel spacers allow large tires to be mounted in your vehicle as well as increase the performance and grip on the wheels.

2. Enhance grip: The wider the wheel spacer, the more grip and comfort in handling the vehicle. They provide you with an extra wheel track width and make the car more stable.

3. Big brake clearance: Wheel spacers give extra room clearance for fitting big brake kits into your vehicle. They provide the extra space you need to firmly fix the brakes.

4. Adjusts the offsets: Wheel spacers are used to adjust a new set of rims that don’t fit well to prevent them from hitting the suspension or even the control arms. If the rims offset is high, it can affect the insider liner when making a U-turn.

5. Increase stability: The wheel spacers are used to create a space for the wheels when turning. It enables the tires to move far apart thus distributing the weight equally among the four wheels when the car is moving.

6. Enhance appearance: The spacers boost the appearance of your vehicle. The wheels push outside giving the vehicle a manly look.

7. Increase traction: Many people install spacers on the vehicle to increase traction when cornering and for better handling in rough weather.

8. Resistant to rollover: Once the wheel is moved further from the stock wheel hub, they add more leverage to the wheel thus increasing resistance to roll over.

9. Cost-effective: If you compare the price of buying a wider tire to increase the stability of the vehicle, wheel spacers are inexpensive.

10. Improve driving experience: Using custom-made spacers for your car type increase your driving experience.

 

Cons:

1. Increase scrub radius: Although spacers increase the track width, they can also increase the scrub radius which later affects the inner fender-well clearance of the vehicle. This makes you use more effort when steering to turn the vehicle at low speed.

2. Premature failure: Sometimes the wheel bearing can be affected by the size of the spacers or the rims and this can cause premature failure.

3. Critical to safety: If the bolts are loosely fitted, they can cause failure or lead to wheels falling off affecting your safety. You need to tightly re-torque the bolts to ensure they firmly hold the wheels.

4. Affects the wheel suspension: When the wheels are far apart, they affect the steering of the vehicle make you use more effort since the springs no longer absorb bumps.

5. Poor quality: If one of the wheels mounting holes is out round, then there is a possibility all mounting holes will be out of round and this will have a negative impact on the factory wheel studs.

6. Stud bending or snapping: Buying long studs can affect leveraging of the vehicles and later can lead to stud snapping or even bend causing the wheel to fall off.

7Additional cost: Installing wheel spacers to increase the stability and predictability of your vehicle increases the cost of installation in your vehicle.

8. Wrong hardware: If you purchase the wrong wheel spacer for the vehicle, it will cause a serious problem for you.

9. Affects car warranty: If you install wheel spacers from a different manufacturer, you can’t access repair and maintenance services from the car’s manufacture because it amounts to the violation of warranty terms.

10. Liability issues: There are certain states which restrict wheel spacer installation due to its liability issues.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. TFN

    Article SUCKS! Information repeated, hard to understand/No explanation of part names, and it’s very hard to read when all the ads are popping up, blocking the text and causing my screen to jump all over. FYI: If your ad keeps me from getting the information I’m looking for, I will not buy your product out of principle!

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.