Widening steel rims?

[FST4RD]

Hi all, looking into widening the factory steel 15's on my L300.
Think they are 6" rims, by the time the widened enough to reach the outter guard I'm assuming that they'll be closer to 10" on the back and perhaps 7 or 8" on the front?

Is widening steel rims safe?
How much does it cost?

Tried a search and nothing came up...

[d1 mule]

safe but cant use on the track but seeing as its a van i doubt you would take it to the track anyways.

from memory about $100 a wheel but not 100% sure and STAY AWAY from elite wheels go to royce clive or arrow of something

[GTTpower]

http://www.oldschool.co.nz/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=9715

hello sorry didnt pipe up earlier but yeah shit going down

anyway from my experience:

arrow do not do steel, they will do alloy rims widened and 2 or 3 piece design, $2500 upwards. as mentioned they send steel elsewhere, and as it turns out they go to elite where i went

dean and tania at elite are a good bunch and have made my 2nd set of wheels fine for me, im picking them up this week. about $600-$700 shipped up to aucks, uncoated

HPC have raised all prices and now will charge $98 per rim for the cermachrome/hipercoat 'silver' that i had on my first set

elite will profile cut any pattern you want out of the centers as long as its structurally sound, but didnt say anything about legalities or road use. i think in my project forum someone (prob mikuni) worked out my 9's were legal but my 10s were not, by a few mm? or something. cares.

so yeah ask me if any q's i'll be happy to help

[d1 mule]

in my experience elite are a waste of space bunch of wankers that didnt want my money.

after 5 weeks of going in once a week to ask "have you done my wheels yet?" and the response "oh shit i forgot about those, ill get onto them next week"
i told them "so you ovbiously dont want my money then, ill go buy some other wheels"

was almost worth it for the look on the wankers face

[Leon]

I used to have widened steelies on my Mini race car.

Then they ripped the centre of the wheel holes out of the wheel, so they stayed bolted to the hub, the rest of the wheel did the full length of the back straight by itself, and I ground away the ball joint sliding to a halt.

I bought some alloys after that

[FST4RD]

Yeah my van is just a work van... but as most people know with the L300 vans the rear wheels stick so far inside the arches it's not funny.
Idea for the van was the wind the front sus down a bit, 2" lowering blocks in the rear and widen the steel rims kinda bozo styles with some stretched tyres on them.
Something like this but not as low, or as extreme, and not a VW

[TRD Man]

I used to have widened steelies on my Mini race car.

Then they ripped the centre of the wheel holes out of the wheel, so they stayed bolted to the hub, the rest of the wheel did the full length of the back straight by itself, and I ground away the ball joint sliding to a halt.

I bought some alloys after that

You should never widen a standard Mini wheel. They were renowned for doing exactly what yours did.
For racing you needed to get some reversed Mini Cooper S wheels which had a stronger centre welded in the reverse direction to create more offset.
You could buy them new from NZ Motor Corporation for about $12 a wheel. Of course that was 1978.

[Truenotch]

I think you should be able to run widened steels at the track. The MSNZ rules say that "Steel wheels should not be modified from the manufacturer's specifications". So if your manufacturer is the engineer who did the modification/creation I see no issue with it.

There are plenty of race cars out there that run custom fabbed wheels, so a correctly widened steel (done by a ticketed engineer) should be fine. As long as the engineer becomes the manufacturer .