Am I thinking straight here?

[grizgut]

I have 16" merc SL alloys on the van. Fronts are 16"x7" ET35 with 6mm spacers, the rears are 16"x8" ET 30 with no spacers. The tyres are 225x55 front and 225x50 rear. They look good. The van has had front and rear stud conversions.

Problem is, the PO has fitted car load rated tyres between 91 and 94. Not good.

I quite fancy steels and can get some merc ones reasonably cheaply, they are 16"x6" ET 39. I would like to put bigger tyres on to better suit the Subaru engine fitted at the same time (can't afford Aidan's gearbox services at the moment so looking for cheaper fix).

Should I go with the steels? I can get 195x75 van rated tyres pretty cheaply but will they fit? I do realise that the speedo will be wrong but can pop my phone on the windscreen and use Android speedometer instead. The van is conservatively lowered on 50mm AVOs from brickwerks

Any help greatly appreciated, if this works I'll eBay the wheels as they have great tyres and are in pretty good nick.

[California Dreamin]

195's would normally fit on rim widths of 5.5 - 7 inch so 6J's are fine for this tyre size.

195/75 R16's are 7.26% bigger (compared to standard 185's) so good for your Scubi . Plus...as speedo's on T25's read about 10% over, even with this tyre size the speedo should be closer to 'REAL' speed but still reading slightly faster (which is always a good thing)

As for these actual rims and the offset...I just don't know but they don't sound like they will be far out.

Martin

[Zebedee]

Compared to the 7" SL alloys on the front, those 16" x 6" rims will give a little more clearance between suspension and rim and about 25mm more space between rim and arch.
On the back you'll have 16mm or so more clearance on the inside and 34mm or so on the arch compared to the 8" ones.

[grizgut]

Thanks Zebedee, it should make it easier to get the correct type of tyres as well. I just wondered if the tyres I'm thinking of getting will fit?

[kevtherev]

I think that question has been answered by Martin