[DeTomaso] Fw: FOR Sale Rant

[Ken Green]

Jack,
 
    All the issues you raise also apply to any wheels ordered from a vendor.  I think we only hear about the wheels that have problems, and all the instances where everything goes well never gets mentioned.
 
    If it's as bad as you think, we would be nuts to ever buy expensive wheels from a vendor and should always make our own measurments and order custom wheels.  It would be trivial to make a tool for measuring the position of the hub wrt surrounding metal.
 
Ken

--- On Sat, 9/19/09, JDeRyke at aol.com <JDeRyke at aol.com> wrote:


From: JDeRyke at aol.com <JDeRyke at aol.com>
Subject: Re: [DeTomaso]   Fw:  FOR Sale Rant
To: detomaso at realbig.com
Date: Saturday, September 19, 2009, 2:25 PM


FWIW, I've never heard of anyone successfully buying aftermarket wheels 
(even those built to order) that simply bolted onto a GR-4, Gr-5 or GT5-S 
conversion and fit correctly. All of the successful ones started with the wheels 
and tires IN HAND and went from there- including the vendors who do these 
conversion commercially. One reason is, the spot-welded Pantera chassis moves 
around over the years, many cars have been in traffic accidents and 
inexpertly repaired, and some if not most were actually welded asymetrically in the 
factory jigs. 
All this means the suspension mounting lug locations on the left may not 
perfectly match the right and thus identical wheels will not wind up in the 
same place relative to the fender edges. One engineer-owner found his 
unmolested car to have the front crossmember welded in place some 1-1/2" LOWER on 
one side, causing the entire front body- with its nicely fitting panel joints- 
to be slightly skewed, and again- factory wheels not well aligned to the 
fender edges. Regardless of Ford's best efforts, these are hand-built cars!
Such problems are easily solved during flair mounting if the wheels & tires 
are at hand, but after-the-fact, spacers, cutting and machining wheels and 
other antics are often necessary to get a symmetric look. I also remember 
one owner that took quite a while to do his all-metal GR-4 conversion, and by 
then, the tires he'd planned to use and had based his calciulations on were 
no longer available.... Good luck doing things the other way around- J 
Deryke
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