Dyipney

After one of my front spacers failed on me while the vehicle was moving, which was an absolute nightmare come true, I knew they had to go. The family lost all feeling of being safe in the jeep and refused to ride in it. I know a lot of users have had zero issues with spacers and will swear by them, but my experience tells me otherwise. To me, they introduce an additional fail point to an already heavily stressed part of the drivetrain. You're not even supposed to use an impact wrench when torquing down the wheel onto the spacer, which results in shredding out the threads on the spacer bolts. I was careful never to do that myself, but the mechanics in the shop wouldn't know that and probably did it.

Anyway, long story short, I had these steelies built with a 2.5" inch backspace. (The shop pics show mockup with zero backspace, just for fun.) These fit the normal 5x5 JK bolt pattern so I wouldn't have to re-drill the hubs and rotors. Spray painted satin black with satin clearcoat.

It's the next best thing to beadlocks (less than half the cost), and they have an inch less backspace than a beadlock. Of course, with the right budget I would have still gone with beadlocks and might still get them eventually. For now, these work and look great.








Zero backspace mockup just for fun:







Link to more pics in the gallery: here

MICHAEL450f

Also had a spacer fail.. But it was due to the stealership cross threading the lug nuts. These things look good!

LOLO9293

So kind of a stupid question but what exactly is backspacing?? And what's so important about it? I also want to know where I could get some wheels like that. I don't want to run spacers for reasons like that happening.

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TheEpiphanee

If you don't mind my asking, what kind of spacer were you running?

Dyipney

Backspacing is the distance if you look on the back side of the wheel between the wheel plate (where the wheel is bolted on to the jeep) and the rim edge (if you could draw an imaginary plane across the rim edge). The less backspace the farther out your wheels are going to stick out, making your overall axle/wheel width wider.

The less backspace, the "deeper" your wheels will look from the front.

Backspace is important to prevent an oversized tire from rubbing against internal components such as control arms, sway bar links, etc. My previous wheels had a 5-inch backspace and would rub up against the control arms, so I compensated for that by adding spacers (bad decision). Less backspace can also help give you additional turning radius.

Dyipney

They were the blue aluminum Spidertrax ones, 1.5 inches thick.