BEACHBUGGY WHEELS & TYRES Wheels and tyre choice are fundamental to a beachbuggy buildup , get them wrong and its easy to ruin the overall look of a beachbuggy. Normally beachbuggy builders use fat rear tyres, typically 10" wide, and skinny front tyres to obtain the classic buggy look, of course it really depends what fits the dimensions of a particular beachbuggy design such as wheelarch size, body width etc.. Most buggyists use 15" wheels all round, but I decided to use 15" rear and 14" front to ape the Hot Rod stance, also in common with many others I used alloy spacers to try to fill the rear arches with wheels n tyres, this worked to some extent using 1" spacers with my original 8" rear Interceptors, but in the end this just wasn't good enough.... The above picture shows my buggy at an early stage with its chrome 8x15 and 6x14 Interceptor steels , they were cheap and can really look the part, I never drove it in the wet much so the chrome remained quite good , but I've seen some pretty sad looking sets of chrome wheels on some old buggys, not good, not good at all. The above picture shows my buggy with its new rear Ultralite 10x15's and front Superlite 6x14's, I decided to bite the bullet and spend some serious dosh to buy these alloy wheels because I was sick of the Interceptors looking too small for the rear arches, and needed some sort of control over offsets. With these Ultralite 3 piece split rims I was able to specify the width of the inner and outer "rims" of the rear wheels and hence the offset. Thus I was able to have a nice deep dish and a good looking "rear end". I managed to buy some second hand "General" 265/60 x15 rear tyres with good tread for a great price, as apparently a lot of the older muscle cars are a good source of buggy tyres as they used wide 15" tyres, Result! The only painfull part of the process was that both the rear inner center and the whole of the 1 piece front wheels were painted silver, but my wish was to have everything polished alloy and shiny, this meant countless hours of polishing with wet and dry abrasive paper, emery cloth, drill attachments and tired fingers etc, very very time consuming but worth the end result. Now thats what I'm talking about... Because beachbuggy wheels and tyres are so big they weigh a lot, for example I weighed my steel wheels and alloy wheels because I was concerned with unsprung weight affecting my handling, as heavy steel wheels and tyres can really cause a light fibreglass body to crash and thud when driving on a bumpy road. This is what I found, crickey! look at the weight of those chrome steels.... WHEEL WEIGHTS TYRE WEIGHTS CHROME STEEL INTERCEPTORS ALLOY ULTRALITE ALLOY SUPERLITE 265/60 15 FRONT 6X14 ....19LB 14LB 19LB REAR 8X14 ....29LB 14LB   29LB The Ultralite (right) 10x15 weighs as much as its name suggests, 14lb which is the same as its 6x14 Superlite brother! Note pic right, that the Ultralite has a far deeper dish than the sculpted Steel Interceptor on the left. To lower the front ride height without attacking the front torsion bars and making the ride harder by removing leaves (not good) , I decided to use the more elegant solution of drop spindles. The only problem I found was that the wheel clearance was a problem due to my 14" front wheels fouling the disc brake calipers, so a pair of 1/2 " alloy spacers solved that problem. I haven't found the need to use front or rear anti roll bars as the handling is so good anyway plus they make the suspension look to cluttered and ugly.