After what feels like eons of deliberating wheel style and dimension combinations I finally ordered a set of 8 spoke, steel, chrome, 16×7″, 6×5.5″, 0 offset, 4″ backspacing US Steel rims! I was all over the place with this decision. The rims she had on her before were the same style and I have always liked the look of them. They were in such bad shape both in their rusty appearance and in the fact that they required so much lead to balance that I really don’t think rechroming them was a good idea. Among countless other options, I considered going back to original style steel wheels with the chrome caps but those never got me that excited and I’m just partial to the way she was when I first brought her home. Though I stuck with the same style rims I did change the diameter from 15″ to 16″ so that I can share tires with the Tacoma and I changed the width from 8″ to 7″ because some say it helps to not break the bead when aired down.
A year or so ago after we got back from our long awaited Baja trip where Bernadett too often reminded me that our tires were in pretty bad shape (especially when I took her hostage on an 8 hour trip up the remote Laguna Salada valley starting north of San Felipe and pulling into Guadalupe Canyon Hot Springs well after dark) we took the Tacoma to the Tire Store in San Luis Obispo. When we got there, after calling to verify that they had a set of 265/70 BFG T/A KO2 tires, the guy told us they didn’t in fact have those but that they did have a set of 265/75s and that they put them on ‘those’ Tacomas all the time. Our coil springs were in pretty bad shape and we were often bottoming out over rutted Baja dirt roads so I figured the extra height would help a bit and I decided to get them. Hello rubbing… after removing the mud flaps, screwing the wheel-well lining to the body, adding 1″ spacers (this did stop the rubbing on the frame) and replacing the worn out OEM springs with stockier Old Man Emu 881 springs they still rub the wheel-well lining when turning! So I’m going to take these 265/75s off of the Tacoma and put them on Old Bessie and go back to 265/70s on the Tacoma.