Spacers or not?

[Frazerb]

Any views / experiences on putting a set of spacers on the rear wheels of a 944. I have the cab and often think the arches could be filled a little more. I have a full set of cups on the car which do look good but did consider buying some 9mm spacers from porsche shop.

So general questions......spacers or not and if so what size works well?

Finally are the ones on porsche shop ok....can you get better?

Thanks in advance...all have a Great Christmas and New Year.

Frazer

 

[edh]

I'd have thought spacers are much the same wherever you buy them

Make sure you have enough thread left for the nuts to be properly secured - you can't really see with closed nuts. Ideally you should have enough thread to screw on an open wheelnut so that all the thread of the nut is engaged. (That wasn't the case when I tried 7mm spacers on the front of my turbo)

 

[Diver944]

I think 5mm shims are about the widest thing you can bolt in there without fitting longer studs.

Proper spacers will have longer studs included, but they will cost more than shims

 

[TTM]

If you are satisfied with the handling and mostly look after improving looks I would also fit a thicker rear sway bar in order to compensate for the understeer the wider rear track will induce.
I use 15 mm spacers and the 19 mm set on stiffest and it feels about right. I run 16" wheels though.
I had tried 15 mm spacers with the original 16 mm rear sway bar and although it looked perfect it understeered too much for my liking.
Hope this helps.

 

[sawood12]

Ultimately you should use spacers in order to correctly set your wheel to the right postition according to the wheel and hub offsets. This sets up the correct loading on the bearing with little or no moment forces that cause the bearings to resist loads in directions they are not intended to resist - also it puts the wheel in the right place for the alignment of the suspension. If you have the wheel more inboard or outboard in threory you should have your alignment reset to compensate. However Porsche hubs seem to be so over-engineered people seem to get away with a whole plethora of combinations of wheel offsets and spacers with no problems so it probably wont do any harm fitting shims for cosmetic purposes.

I have been told that upto 6mm shims you are OK with standard wheel studs - which is what i've got up front. In reality I don't think you can say for sure that x or y mm shims are OK or not as my current wheels have a much thinner hub than my previous set so even with the 6mm shims i've got more stud length than I had before - the nuts used to stick out noticably before I fitted the shims. In theory the correct shim size for the offset of my front wheels is about 3.5mm but i've not seen shims that thin so i've gone to 6mm. My alignment has been setup with the shims in place and I must say I did notice a marked improvement in turn-in sue to the wider track.

By the way i've got some 10mm shims in the garage if that is the size you think you'll need.