Quote:
Originally Posted by peteco
Does anyone have any evidence the wheel adapters cause a dangerous situation? Surely the bearing and axle loads are different but are they being overly stressed?
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Back in the day, like the late 60s-70s there were quite few spacer setups around here in the Minneapolis area. Chrome reverse wheels were also very popular and for bearing load and handling do the same thing as spacers. On the front, with the old style tapered roller setups and zero offset wheels the reverse would put the centerline of the wheel outside of the outer bearing, which puts the system into and overhung setup instead of bridge. Front bearings didn't like that and would certainly fail early back then. It was hard to tell for the rear bearings as they had fairly short life in many of the cars anyway as they were changing to unit bearings from adjustable tapered rollers on the semi floating rears and it didn't go very well for a while.
It was also fairly common to see up to 3/4-1 inch slip on wheel spacer used for clearance with long studs. They broke regularly and the big engine with big tires stuff would shear them right off sometimes at launch. They also had terrible wheel runout.
The nutted on with second set of stud style we have now wasn't around much then, unless it was on trucks and I didn't see many trucks in general.
It would be interesting to see if someone could shoot the axle hub temps in the rear with and without a spacer in place, as that would tell us a lot about how bad the bearing is getting abused, or not. The main differential may run hotter also, if it is a semi floater (don't know what the Dodges used) because there will also be extra load transferred to the carrier bearings inside the differential. We haven't heard of wholesale rear axle bearing failures with the Dodges when spacers put on, so probably not too bad and issue.
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