cubicleslave

Hey everyone, thanks for your helpful replies! It turns out that everyone is at least partly right in stating my objectives. I live on a killer hill. Most adults of average fitness are gasping for breath after walking up it. So I am after some setup that will allow me to go on a milk run to the grocery store in the snow. It's a valid point that getting special tires just for one snow is overkill. However, I plan to just leave these wheels/tires sitting in my garage untill the snow comes, and I will not be using them at all otherwise. So, I will be using these tires for many years to come, albeit sparingly. Looking over the replies, and also checking the wheel fitment sticky (thanks Smike), it appears that 17x7 rims are the narrowest rims I will find that fits my stock brakes (6 piston in front). I've got a follow up question: will I be able to mount a narrower tire with 7inch rims compared to 8 inch? And does anyone know of a specific tire that works very well in snow, and requires the 7 inch rim?

RaNGVR-4

iTrader: (4)

Evo brakes are not 6 piston front.

currahee474

Honestly its going to be a pretty dumb idea. Running skinny *** wheel/tire combo is for snow/ice rally cars. It gives the car a chance to sink through the snow and grab traction to the DIRT underneath. Now if you do this on a street car, you are going to be getting asphalt underneath...something that snow rally tires wont have as much traction on. As everyone else has previously mentioned, stock wheels with M+S tire rating will benefit you even better than skinny tires/wheels.

DaveK

iTrader: (21)

The OP is not looking to run WRC 4" wide tires. Narrower tires are used so that the part of the tire that is in contact has more weight behind it, the idea being in snow to be able to push down thru the fluffy stuff to get onto the hardpack a little bit better. I don't think in many cases you'd actually be able to get down to dirt or pavement simply by using narrower tires. The WRC studded tires are able to claw their way down to gravel, but those tires are designed to work well grabbing ice, and probably don't work quite as well when trying to grip permafrosted dirt.

For the OP, I think something in the 195-215 width would suit your needs just fine, and should all work with 7" rims. When you're looking for replacement rims, make sure you buy something with the proper offset, as a 7" wide rim won't have the same offset that your stock 8" rims do.

Dave

cubicleslave

ok, here is another update. After looking around a bit more and thinking over my objectives, I've decided to keep my stock OEM 17x8 rims. What I will do is buy some 215/50/17 blizzaks to go on my OEM rims. I will also buy a new set of 18x9 +29 rims, and mount some 255/35/18 tires on them for non-snow driving. The only time I will put on the blizzaks is when I actually see deep snow on my driveway, at which time I will break out my bottle jacks and impact wrench and swap the wheels out. When the snow is gone, the blizzaks come back off. I will NOT be doing any aggressive driving or hard cornering with the blizzaks, since I would be crazy to do that in snow. And lastly, I am a CHEAP GUY ... so I will not put this plan into action until I use up the remaining useful tread on the tires I currently have, a set of all-season radials. I don't think we'll be getting another big snow this year in Oregon anyway, so these tires should do me. Thanks again everyone!

DaveK

iTrader: (21)

Cool, glad you got it figured out, and sounds like a good plan of action. FWIW, here's some video of my car on OEM sized blizzaks on stock wheels:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CcZ7dyIdVo

Dave