Wheely good stuff

Tuesday, 6 September 2005 | Comments (0) | Categories: Exterior, Wheels/Tyres

Well, big up to Ben for bringing his rims in on Saturday to test out the fitment and work out offsets that I'll be requiring. Before he got there I wacked on some shagged but lowered coilovers to get a better idea of height and the car is now the automotive version of the leaning tower of Pisa. There being at least a 5deg angle looking from the rear of the car left to right.

Anyway, Ben's rims are SSR SP01 Professors of the following specs - (F) 17x9 +24, (R) 17x9 -1. Quite a nice combo really, and they fitted up very nicely under the guards. We had about 20mm clearance to the outside line of the guards on the front, maybe a little more, and about the same on the rear - the fronts however didn't have much camber at all if any dialed in so you could add another 3-5mm of clearance.

Some pics of the testing session:
- Me being surley
- Side Profile from front
- Side Profile from rear
- Quarter shot Rear
- Quarter shot Front
- Rear Guard profile
- Front Guard profile
- Side shot
- Rear coilover clearance
- From above'ish

Since Saturday, I've been trawling all the good rim manufacturers across Japan, and was looking closely at the Gram Lights 57PRO's - a really nice dishy rim with about any offset you want to order. On Sunday night/Monday morning, Jash mentioned that the Volk Racing CE28N's could be worth looking into - these being something I've considered in the past but not really looked into greatly. I took another close look and came to the conclusion that they were pretty much what I'd be after, and of the same stature as the mighty QF's.

So after check through the sizes, I'm going to step up to the plate with some 19" rims of momentous proportions for the Sillbeer project:

- Front: Volk Racing CE28N 19x9.5 +12 (Tyres: 245/35ZR19)
- Rear: Volk Racing CE28N 19x10.5 +12 (Tyres: 265/30ZR19)

Pic of the rim in 19" bronze, which is pretty much what I'll be looking at:



As you can see from the pics, the larger guards really tend to dwarf the 17" rim, one of the reason why I'm going 19's. You also rarely see dishy 19's on an S13 Silvia so thought it was about time (except for the Wise Sport 19's on C-Red's Pig v2.0 [pic: Franz])

On another front, I'm looking to kit the car out with some specialised bracing from a newcomer to the scene - Zenith Tuning. Not that new really considering some of their products are already gracing a number of the Drift Nats competitors. I'll be using in no particular order their Guard Braces, Steering Column Bush, Rear Cradle Bushes, Boot Brace and C-Pillar Brace (still under development). I'll make sure I get plenty of info from Brad on these before doing a quick write up (you can see from of these for sale already on the NissanSilvia.com forums in the Sponsors for sale section).

Seeya
Brendan