Before & After: Using Spacers For A More Aggressive Stance

chrisatelement — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 01:00:32 +0000

Here is a brief little write up showing the effect of hubcentric wheel spacers and how they can improve the look and stance of your vehicle. By pushing your wheels out a small amount, anywhere from 5mm to 25mm can make a big difference in the appearance of your car. A lot of people don’t like the “sunken in” look of most wheels once they install them on their car and the way around this is spacers. A lot of manufacturers make their wheels in only a couple different offsets that will fit more of a general range of vehicles. For them, it is cost effective to do this, for example, making a 5×114.3 +35mm offset wheel will fit a LOT of different cars. By adding spacers you are not changing the width of the wheel but the OFFSET. The lower the offset is, the further away from your vehicle’s hub the wheel will sit, making it more flush with the fender. The higher the offset, the further in the wheel sits and tucks inside the fender well more.

Here is one of our good customer’s 1998 Lexus GS400 which has 20×9.5 MRR HR3 wheels at all four corners. The 9.5′s all the way around where chosen instead of 8.5′s up front because the 9.5′s concave in more which looks much better. This GS400 can easily accomodate 9.5′s all the way around without spacers. This car actually has 25mm spacers in the back making this rim essentially a +13mm offset. He has 15mm spacers in the front making the fronts essentially a +23mm offset. This car is lowered quite a bit on Tein Flex coilovers. He is also running a good amount of negative camber so the wheels tuck in nicely. This customer is a perfect example of the type of person that will do whatever it takes to achieve a certain look. Thats how most of the employees here at Element Wheels feel about our own cars too. We like to push the limits of vehicle fitment.

Below are pics of the front of the GS400 before and after we installed Ichiba 15mm Hubcentric Bolt-on spacers.

-Chris @ Element

BEFORE:

15mm Ichiba Version 2 Bolt-On Spacer:

AFTER:

Element Wheels Aftermarket Custom Wheel and Tire Blog » gs400

Before & After: Using Spacers For A More Aggressive Stance