Ok my wheels will be eback from the powder coaters tommorow. They are black solid rims. I have lowered the front 3 inches and the rear the same amount, and now I need to buy tires. The car is black(not suede , but 35 year old laquer) and it sports and original interior. I like the whitewall look(like Mcphails 56), but don't know what would look the best. I open to suggestions. Thanks in advance Shane T.
Go with the medium white walls. My uncle ran a '57 Bel-Air with chrome wheels and baby moons. He put black walls on it, and it never did look right to me.
I've got a set of redline port-a-walls so i may go black walls and try the redlines to see how they work. The problem with the whitewall is size selection coker doesn't have a 245 or 255 60 www radial tire, and that's the size I need/want for the rear. They do make a 205 for the front but that is as big as they seem to go in a 65 or 60 series.
shane - Depends on what period and style you're building to... if you're doing a late 50's/early 60's cruiser/custom - WWW's. If the car is built for speed - blackwalls. No self respecting racer ran whites - they were for the drive-in crowd. Later (after '63-ish) cars started runnin' thinner WW's, but they were still wide by today's standards. Figure an inch to an inch and a half min on the width. I'm a ****er for WWW's, BTW. Do be careful with porta-walls, on radials the abrasion of the porta can cut into the sidewall if the porta extends into the 'bulge' where the tire contacts pavement.
Try www.widewhitewalltires.com/ I got a set of 215/65/15 for the front and 235/75/15 rears. I got these before I became an Alliance member or else I would have gone to ****er first just in case anyone was wondering. They also do redlines, have a look. I put the rims and tyres from my truck onto my 56, I love the look especially with black steelies. Looks really tough. What about the pictures?? P.
The car is a semi fast car with a t******* motor..... It likes to have it's tires hazed off at least twice every trip.
Is it a custom or a hot rod? I'm thinking age will enter into the opinions you get. A performance car from the early sixties in my neighborhood would never have thin WWs. A mild custom would sport the 1" WWs. probably on chrome reverse wheels but at least have full disc hub caps of some kind. Other areas may have been different. I love the black on black dog dish hubcap style that is popular now. They stand out in the crowd today. I don't remember it being popular in the sixties though.
Plain black rims? "Back in the day" (early 60s), cars usually came with body colour wheels. Full wheel covers, stock or otherwise, would have been the norm. Little baldy caps (baby moons) and blackwall tires were popular, stepping up and adding trim rings if the funds were available. If you had money you wanted to spend on wheels and tires, chrome reverse (with bullet spiders or "baby moons") or chrome plated "mags" (think Astros) would've been next on the list with whitewalls added last. Whitewalls if used would have most likely been the narrow ones after 62 because WWW became pretty uncommon and untrendy (is that a word?) when the manufacturers went to the narrow ones. Probably became hard to get after the dealer's stocks ran out, but I'm only speculating, my first job was for a buck an hour in a carwash and even after moving on to other jobs, whitewall tires were not on my priority list as a high school student with a set of wheels. Ultra thin whitewalls, multiple stripes, and gold or red stripes (with or without a whitewall) came in a little later and were usually found on luxury or muscle cars. I don't remember seeing the dog dishes getting popular until the mid 70s, and then usually with a trim ring. While there were a few totally primered cars around, they were the ones being worked on and were always thought of as waiting for paint. This obsession with primered cars is a very recent development, so glossy black rims on a glossy black car would have been considered "normal" back in the early 60s and would have carried full covers or trim rings and hubcaps of some sort. Most cars from the late 60s on would've had the stock steel rims and caps swapped out for "mags", even the factory rally wheels were getting tossed aside for them a lot of the time.
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