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The truth about spacers...


James Junior

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I love the way people can start denouncing things IE spacers, and then fit wider aftermarket wheels with higher offsets, which do exactly the same :lol: while its true that fitting wheels or spacers will place slightly more strain on the components, unless they are excessive, its not suddenly going to cause catastrophic failure.

 

And if you do fit wheels or spacers you may need to adjust the alignment from the std settings in order to not get adverse affects, I have also fitted both to different cars in the past and had no terrible side effects, but then if your going to widen the track, you would of course re think the geometry........wouldn't you ;)

Let's have a look in different perspective.. pro and cons and in way what tricky Ricky said is right but pending on angle of view....

 

Pro of spacer:-

Widening the track either by spacer of offset, this would reduce the weight transfer. That's good news in a broad brush (as the theory is we can utilise grip on both inner and outer tyre. ) As tyre grip relates to vertical load you put on a given corner. Increment of vertical load you the more grip you get ( that's why F1 aero as an example) but it has a tip over point, where overloading the grip falls rather rapidly.

 

Con:-

 

For both spacer and offsets, the input position is further outboard. That's means the moment arm is greater than standard. (Moment is force x distance). Therefore the input into chassis components would be far higher. (Bushes as an example) Durability will fall for sure.

 

For spacer now in a mechanical bolt joint, the number of components within the sandwich increase the clamp load decreases. The stiffness of the joint can fall. Because previously in stand format, you have the friction due to clamp force between wheel mounting face brake disc and brake disc to hub and bearing assemblely. Now considering a spacer added.... You have wheel to spacer, spacer to brake disc then brake disc to hub and bearing. Therefore in order to achieve the same clamp force and the force to be less than friction forces between the component would be less. Therefore up in torque of the wheel bolt would be required. Then of course to validate the up in torque properly, some scientific tightening experiment will be needed to ensure the stud or bolt are not into the yield proportion of the torque vs angle graph.

 

Just my own 2p... :)

 

我從使用 Tapatalk çš„ Nexus 6 發é€

 

I hope I never end up sat next to you at a dinner party.

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Difference even for mildly quick road driving is vast. Really slows the cars responses as I've mentioned before in other threads. I'm actually about to take mine back off again to see what I'm missing again having had them on for 12 months. I'll miss the gorgeous filled arch look but I can only blame Nissan for the madness.

 

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So having pulled them off again today I'm going to drop them onto the for sale section.

No more tramlining over ridges and bumps, much less scrub when turning right radii, slightly more body roll, much more precise especially under braking but by far the most noticeable effect is they were definitely causing the traction control too kick in earlier. I felt it when I first put them on but put it down to my driving style changing, but it would "bog" slightly on any sort of sharpish bend when getting on the gas despite not breaking away. Now it seems to let it break away slightly earlier and allow a little more sideways before it throttles back for you and a lot more before it slaps you in the face by grabbing brakes for you. Slightly concerned about wet weather response because I felt like the spacers made that more comfortable lol

 

Spacers are definitely the devil's spawn.

Edited by coyoteboy
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