Ichiba Wheel Spacers

[Yeldarb]

I'm not trying to be a party pooper () here but if something happens accident wise and you have spacers on your cars you will NOT be covered. This is the only reason why i dont have any

I'm with you on that.

[Nexus]

I'm not trying to be a party pooper () here but if something happens accident wise and you have spacers on your cars you will NOT be covered. This is the only reason why i dont have any

+1 - RTA says no - but to balance that :
If you are going to have your car engineering checked and certified- which can pass things like spacers if they want - then hub centric spacers would be a potential engineering pass whilst otherwise it's just a blanket no. Which is why they are not legal - but it may be possible to have hub centric's passed by inspection.

[advancespeedJEFF]

at least i know i can spark up a nice, civil online chat about something car related lol

[SarcasticOne]

at least i know i can spark up a nice, civil online chat about something car related lol

unfortunately wheel fitment/legality is a rather hot topic here...

I don't want to be seen to be encouraging people to do unsafe or illegal things, but if they choose to fit these, they can.

It's been started that these are possibly unsafe, and could be considered illegal in some/all states, we also know there it's people who will do things because they want to, so can we leave it at that, and not let this turn into a slinging contest like so many wheel discussion topics.

[kmh001]

Well, I'm not an auto engineer either, but I would place a bet that hub-centric spacers would not have the breakage problem because the loads are still hub-centric.
A spacer that diverts the loading to wheel studs etc is what can be dangerous.

In terms of the forces acting on the wheel bearings, the only thing the spacer achieves is to change the wheel offset. Spacers almost always place the offset outside the design capability of the wheel bearings - which means the bearings will fail.

I recently completed an engineering investigation of a vehicle that had a complete wheel and hub separation while driving at 80 km/h. It was repaired and failed again in exactly the same way less than 3 months later. The vehicle had significantly modified rear wheel offset - hence the recurring failure. My investigation found the relevant state road authority was negligent for having signed off on the modification contrary to their own regulations. If the report wasn't confidential I could show some very interesting photos of the failure.

There are genuine reasons for these things being illegal, and the last place I would use wheel spacers is on the race track where stresses are much higher than on the street. You might remember that a young girl was killed at a race track in Victoria when a wheel separated from a car and bounced over the fence into the spectator area.

[bd581]

It's a shame you can't elaborate on your experiences Mal.
Maybe then people will see the dangers associated with this modification.

Then again......probably not

[Nexus]

Yeah, there you go. It might be better than non-hub centric, but they'll always be a sub-standard solution - and if you want a subtle offset change, appropriate wheels are really the way to go. I didn't realise even a hubcentric solution will come apart if the bearings fail. I'm surprised that's a catastrophic failure mode. I thought the worst case is bearing failure...didn't consider wheels coming off because of that.