Since you guys revived my build thread, I suppose I will add a little update for you. While waiting to get to the paint booth to finish the bed sides, I was able to finish up the wheel/tire setup for the truck. I went with Nankang SP-7 tires since they were affordable and had matching tread for the front and rear tires I wanted. Coming from the VW scene, I have experience with Nankangs and they are actually pretty good tires. These SP-7s are very nice. I went with 265/35r22 fronts and 285/40r22 rears since I don't care too much for the ultra low profile look. These two photos are of the 285/40s compared to the 275/60r15s that I currently have on the truck. There is a huge difference in size!
These two photos are the 265/35r22s compared to the 275/60r15s. As you can see, I decided to go with white wheels for sentimental reasons. The truck had white wheels when I bought it and I still really like the overall look it had when I got it. My father-in-law helped me out by mounting these things for me. It was a challenge! We still have to rebalance the fronts and move the weights to the rear side of the wheels.
For the rears, I didn't want to run spacers so I decided to change the backspacing instead. We started with the "stock" GM transit wheels and removed the center section by cutting the welds and then pressing it out.
I decided to go with 4" of backspace (compared to the 6" stock backspace). We flipped the center section since the inside of the wheel hoop had a deeper dish. After truing up the wheel, we welded the center back into the hoop and that's it! I did have to remove the outer half of the inner wheel well to get these to fit, but that was necessary anyway during the bed floor raising process. Here are the fronts (left) and rears (right).
I don't have any photos of these on the truck yet because I want to wait until the whole thing is back together, so I'll leave you with one more detail about mounting these wheels for anyone else looking into these. The stock lugnuts are too small in overall diameter and seat inside the taper when mounted, so I went with
these acorn style lug nuts and they fit much better.
