Big Tire Surgery Tutorial: Trimming / Cutting to Fit Large Tires

[MidnightSpecial]

I see a lot of questions floating around about fitting big tires and if trimming is involved. From my own personal setup, the answer is yes. I probably could have gotten away with it if I am staying on road. However, I am going to mob this thing over the summer so I want to make sure I have the clearance.

Lets go over my setup:

- 2.25" perch collar from RPG Offroad
- 315/70r17 Wildpeak AT4w
- 17x8.5 +25mm RRW wheels

This setup rubs at full lock on the inner tabs of the wheel wells. Therefore, time to chop.

Here is a picture of the passenger side fender tab. I have marked the line I chose to cut to keep it as clean looking as possible. The tab holding it down doesn't seem to be very structural. If you remove the tab the fender flair still feels very stable. However, there is a torx screw underneath you need to keep attached to keep the fender flair from wiggling around. I'll go over that next.

Here is the underside of that fender flair tab we want to cut. As you can see there is a torx screw holding it down. Be sure to keep that screw attached when you cut. If you remove the screw, the fender flair will wiggle around freely. I have marked where we want to cut.

I chose to cut this away with a rotary tool but you could probably find other ways to get this done. Once you go through the plastic there will be some very thin soft metal that is easy to cut through. Here is what it looks like.

Here is the end result. Still need to clean this one up to make its more flush and ensure there are no sharp edges.

Here is an image of the driver side at full lock. Clears pretty well.

I drove around on it and backed in the driveway where I have been rubbing since I put on the bigger wheels. I think this will solve the issue going forward. I'll be offroading soon so we will see if it helps while crawling!

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[GLT]

Thanks very much for posting this. Extremely helpful; this is exactly what I'll be doing.

 

[MeBEEF]

This is dope, thanks a bunch.

 

[BigMeatsBronco]

We did the same thing with our Ranger Raptor but instead of using a perch collar, we opted for Leveling spacers instead. 1.5" front and 1" rear. I prefer these because the ride height on the shock absorber is in the same place which also can affect the computerized shocks. Additionally the spring rate is not increased, and the struts still have the full range of motion. This does increase the down travel or droop slightly, and also allows for slightly less compression travel. So it moves the struts range of travel top and bottom limits downward by 1.5 in. In contrast the RPG spring collars just change the ride height by moving the position the Spring Rides on, and the overall shock high and low points remain the same. So at whatever ride height you're at you now have more compression available and less droop available compared to putting a spacer on top of the strut.

We also trimmed the same areas.

Tires are 35x12.50x17 Nitto Mud Grapplers

Wheels are Bronco Sasquatch

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