Hi, anybody running 25mm wheel spacers front and rear with stock wheels?

 

Why would you want to do that?

 

To make the track wider and fill the wheel wells more.

 

especially the back LOL

 

2 words for you "ackermans angle"

 

Can you care to explain?

 

if you do a 25mm spacer, you might have to worry about hitting the inside fender wall, especially if you're lowered. ...and well, your stock bolts may not be long enough to accommodate the extra width.

having said all that, i do have a pair of H&R 4x100 20mm spacers at home somewhere and i may just have to try that out.

 

how about you go with a kic's spacer 15mm?

 

The Ichiba spacers come with extra bolts pressed into the spacer, you bolt the spacers to the hub and bolt the wheel to the spacer and no my Fit is not lowered and it will never be lowered.

 

i think ichiba's are copies of the Kic's spacers...

 

Wheel spacers are a bad idea in my opinion. Unless you're getting a good brand like H&R which will allow you to keep the hub-centric ability of the wheels (with aftermarket wheels you will need to buy properly sized hub centric rings). But even then I would not recommend it personally.

In addition to the fact that the Fit is a front wheel drive car, rear wheel spacers should be avoided. This is a Volkswagen trend that is really stupid, I've seen too many people run wider wheel spacers (or even just wider wheels) on the rear of their front-wheel-drive cars and it's just plain silly, in addition to making the car handle worse. This trend should stay with the less educated VW crowd.

Also just so you know, major aftermarket brake manufacturers, like Brembo for example specifically advise against the use of wheel spacers. Brembo advises that you use a properly sized wheel to clear brakes and suspension components and there is a reason for this, that has way more to do with just "brake clearance".

The reason wheel spacers are bad is because it pushes the wheel out, increases the scrub radius of the wheel and tires, and leads to increased wheel bearing, bushing, ball-joint and suspension wear. In addition to changing the way the suspension acts and behaves with the wheel pushed further out. The suspension movements become slightly altered. Also many of the companies don't replicate a good friction surface on the faces of the spacers, as a result the wheel doesn't maintain proper friction with the hub and the cheap lug studs in the fatter wheel spacer versions can sheer off. I've seen it happen a lot of times, on the wheel spacer brands being mentioned here, which is why if you must run really thick spacers it is advised to upgrade to longer wheel studs (like ARP) and run hub centric spacers that do not include their own separate studs that must be torqued to the wheel hub.

For example on a DC2 Integra, the further out the wheel is from the hub, the "softer" the suspension feels (there's a lot of technical changes going on that lead to this relatively simple sounding change). Guys who run their cars on a road course often find themselves having to switch to stiffer spring rates as a result after switching to wider and lower offset wheels.

One more point, it is usually unsafe to run more than 5mm of wheel spacer on the OEM wheel studs, you need a certain amount of threads inside the lug nuts to be safe.

Just thought I'd share some information about wheel spacers. By all means go ahead and still get them, but there's a lot more to modifications like this than most people know, or than gets shared on these forums, especially in relation to cosmetic or appearance related modifications.

 

cool. post pics when you do it. hopefully, spacing out the wheels will prevent me from wanting to buy new wheels w/ a lower offset.

 

ok, dood...i'm sure we've never seen any terrible trends coming from the JDM culture.

now i don't want to take away too much from your post because you do make MANY valid points which i whole-heartedly agree with.

if you're not going to track your FWD car w/ spacers installed (most owners), it's OK to run spacers and not at all dangerous if installed correctly.

 

Koala, that was quite a reply, I have been running 25mm rear spacers on my S-2000 for about a year and I like the way it handles, I was asking the forum if anybody was using spacers in all 4 OEM wheels to see how they liked it, I have owned Honda vehicles for 25 years and have yet to experience wheel bearing failure even after 200K miles, ball joints last 150K miles normally. My Fit is only driven short trips so I am not worried about these issues.

 

We can start a separate thread for that! Didn't mean to start an argument with the VW comment, but they are responsible for a lot of tasteless mods that can also be very harmful. The "JDM" trend is guilty as well at times, I completely agree. Sorry for the off topic post.

 

no worries. you seem very educated about this subject and i certainly appreciate that you posted that information for other folks to read up so that they don't hurt themselves!

 

I understand people will run spacers with no problems.

I do HPDE at road courses across the country (Buttonwillow CA, to Virginia International Raceway for example), and one season I ran wheel spacers to clear a set of Spoon twinblock calipers. I had a set of 5mm H&Rs for the rear, and a set of 15mm H&Rs that I had an aircraft machine shop machine to 7mm thickness for the front. I was also using ARP's longest wheel stud offered. I didn't have any problems, albeit I was torquing the wheels after every session. I've been running in the advanced run group for the past 6 years, and I've had to replace my front wheel bearings twice (mostly from the extreme track abuse and insane yearly mileage I put on it).

I'm not saying everyone is going to have a problem, I just wanted to point out the problems one could have. A bunch of my friends run spacers on their cars set up for drift, and some of them have gone through several sets of wheel spacers each, some of them resulted in the studs on the spacer shearing off at less than ideal times.

Will you have these problems? Probably not. I just wanted to highlight some of the inherent dangers with running wheel spacers from the extreme to the subtle.

 

depending on application i run wheel spacers. never had a problem on my cars but the again i dont push them out so far.

and there is a REASON why i push them out. i dont just push
them out for looks because it throws off the wheel rate and
suspension geometry. although the Fit's suspension is so
simple and straight forward you wont run into problems with
only a 15mm-20mm spacer.

bearings, another issue. some go bad for no reason too, so
depends on quality from the supplier, how you drive, etc.

 

I guess nobody is running spacers on a Fit

 

I thought about it..but after looking into it it wasn't cost effective vs amount of work switching out to longer studs esp. for around .5".