Hey all need some advice ...

[lopxtc]

Okay here is the situation;

Bought some new wheels for my vehicle and come to find out that the holes for the lug bolts on the wheel are designed for 12mm and VW uses 14mm lug bolts, however the bolt pattern of 5x100 is correct. So I contact the person I got them from and told him this, and requested a refund since the wheels will not fit my vehicle (VW actually only has one model year that used 12mm x 1.5 lug bolts with a 5x100 pattern and that was the 92-97 Passat V6). Well he is balking on the refund and says that he has can get me adapters that would change the bolt size from 14mm x 1.5 to 12mm x 1.5 ... no word on how it will effect the offset. My question is this, do you guys think this kind of adapter is safe? I cant believe that stepping down the size of the lug bolts on a car would be a good thing as the manufacturer used 14mm lug bolts for a reason.

What do you guys think?

Aaron

[Southpaw]

I have had some experience with this so I will throw in my $0.02 while working for VW I had a car that had aftermarket rims and wheel studs installed. It came in with a complaint that at speeds over 65 it developed a vibration. Before test driving I checked for any real obvios problems ball joints, lug NUTS torque ECT. Everything checked out OK. I took it on a test drive and felt no vibration or any thing odd and was about to go back and give it a operating to manufactures spec stamp untill I hit ~70 then all of a sudden I instantally had the scaryest vibration it literily felt like the wheel was about to fall off!! back down to 60 MPH and smooth as glass odd back to 70 same results. Back to the shop I check all suspention components and nothing seems bad at all. I try to take off a lug nut but the stud comes off also (they are threaded the same way and no lock tight :eek: ) 4 of these do the same 1 comes off ok no matter how nice I am pretty much the same on all the other wheels. I take off remaining studs and install same factory rims/tires. Test drive 2 65 no problems, 70 no vibrations, 75 ok. Hmmm must be the rims so back to the shop and I notice that the center of the rim that locates it is about 1/4 inch bigger than the stock VW rim. I recommend that VW takes it in the shorts and buy this poor man a new set of BBS rims because he just purchased the car here with the aftermarket rims and we didn’t catch the problem. My forman decides they wanted to get by on the cheep so they got adapters for the hubs and took the rims to a shop that drilled them out fot the vw studs. I voiced my concern that the lug bolts had a different mating surface angle ECT. But it did solve the problem of the vibration. I left that shop so I may never find out if one of the wheels ever fell off.

So in short Buy rims that are desinged for VW lug bolts or try stud adapters just use locktight and hope you dont have to take the wheels off too many times.

[lopxtc]

Yeah that is pretty much what I figured. The wheels have been listed before on other wheel sites as being able to fit onto my model year Jetta so I figured that they were a safe buy. I was pretty much ready to tell him to shove it on the idea of adapters, but I just wanted to make sure that I was thinking correctly about that.

Thanks for the input.

Aaron