Re: Cragar Soft 8 16x8 on '95 4x4

From: Barry Oliver (barrysuperhawk@comcast.net)
Date: Wed May 13 2009 - 01:38:32 EDT


teseract@moparhowto.com wrote:
> Anyone ever put the Cragar Soft 8 16x8 wheels on a 92-96 Dakota with a
> 265/70R16 tire (equivalent of a 31x10.50 tire on a 15" rim)? The previous
> owner of my Dakota put 31x10.50x15 tires on stock (6" wide) rims and I'd like
> to not repeat the fun bald-in-the-center tread wear. They have a 5" backspace
> which worries me as they're 2" wider than stock but the backspacing is only .5"
> less. I could get the 16x7 with the 4" backspacing but I don't know if I want
> that skinny a rim either with the 265/70R16 General Grabber 2 I wanted to get.
>
> An example would be http://www.summitracing.com and look up part number
> 3977864P.
>
>
> Thanks!
>
> MattB
>
>

Running Xtra wide tires on narrow rims means you have to become
intimately familiar with your tire gauge and rotate ALOT [like every
4-5k miles]

I have over 100k miles worth of experience runnning 13" tires on stock
Dak rims, including over 80K on one set of BFG all-terrains. When I did
swap the all terrains out, they still had 4/32 of tread but I had found
a deal on some Mud tires...
http://s240.photobucket.com/albums/ff153/barrysuperhawk/Dakota/?action=view¤t=idiot.jpg
http://s240.photobucket.com/albums/ff153/barrysuperhawk/Dakota/?action=view¤t=MVC-181S.jpg

The dance goes a bit like this. With BRAND NEW tires [or at least one,
mounted, on the front.] and on CLEAN flat concrete, Air the tire down to
10 psi and roll it at least one full revolution under full truck weight.
  End the roll with the tire on the edge of a piece of file folder paper
that is under the tire approxamately 5% of the width of the tread. Then
slowly air the tire up, stopping at every pound until you can pull the
paper free from under the tire. Do this 3 times and average the result
to the lowest pound. The number will change and most likely will go
down. My particular case averaged out to 36 PSI, but yours will likely
be different. This is your air pressure, inscribe it on your door sill.

The theory is you want just enough air in there to barely raise the
edges of the tread blocks. With my truck, the lift was 3/4 of an inch
on the front, 1" on the unloaded rear. Yours will be less.

The second part of this dance is rotation. You must learn how fast to
rotate your tires. With my truck, it was every 3-4k miles. Literally.
  If I left them to 5K they were howling for the last thousand, and
again for the first thousand. With the BFG's I would notice when going
down a new, freshly paved or just very flat road that my tire noise
would increase, rather suddenly, over the course of 3-400 miles. The
softer the tire, the faster this process, my Pro-comps wanted 2500 mile
rotations to stay happy. With mud or open treads you may need to drape
a sheet of copy paper over the tire and manually check for feathering,
etc...

That is all, the gospel according to Barry, now get ye forth and tire
that Dak...

[and Y'all thought Josh was the most anal one on the list, heh, heh,heh]



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