Uneven tire to fender clearance from side to side Options

[Tdskip]

Good morning. There is a bright orange yellow orb in the sky over Southern California right now. Quite welcome to see it, but I digress.

The 1974 Arizona car has uneven tire to fender clearance from side to side. The tires are the same make and size, it has the same rims on it, but I have about one fingers worth of clearance on the driver side to the tire wall but basically none on the passenger side.

I don’t have a history on the car but the tub is straight and does not evidence any accidents. I haven’t put the car up on a rack to check the alignment but it doesn’t look like the rear camber is noticeably different from side to side.

Any ideas to share? Thanks!

[anderssj]

While I've heard that these wheels had different sizes and offsets, most seem to be for VW Bugs in late 1960s-early 1970s.



My wheels have a backspacing of about 4 1/8 inches (or ~ 105 mm), so their offset is around 20mm. IIRC, the offset on the 914's OEM 15-inch wheels (Fuchs, Mahle, or Pedrini) is 42mm. That means that the American Racing wheels on my car are about 20mm (slightly more than 3/4 inch) outboard of where an OEM wheel would be. With that much additional clearance I probably wouldn't have noticed any side-to-side difference, but with the AR wheels any difference becomes pretty obvious...and makes running a modern low-profile tire almost impossible unless the fenders are massaged.

Were those wheels original to your car? The dealer in Colorado Springs used to install them as a free upgrade (instead of steelies) back in 1972.