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Posted by Clint Dixon on Thursday, May 08, 2008 at 17:40:41 :
Is it possible to swap out lock rings by putting a short profile 5.5 ring on a 6.5 wheel and a tall profile 6.5 ring on a 5.5 wheel, and get them to properly mate together? No, I do not want to try it, and yes, I know that the wheel and lock ring serial numbers would no longer match and that the world could tilt off of its axis.
I only ask because I have never had a 5.5 assembly apart and am unaware of how a cross section through the mating surfaces on a 5.5 would compare to a cross section in the same area of a 6.5. If the design and dimensions of the mating surfaces are the same between wheels, I wonder if any fleet operators ever got narrow and wide wheels mixed up and mistakenly switched the lock rings? If so, that would sure make it tough to declare that a newly discovered truck has 4.89 gearing verses 5.83 based upon the lock ring profile (never mind the odd factory orders that mismatched wheel/tire size and gearing and/or the chances that someone could have switched complete wheel assemblies or drop out 3rd members sometime during the life of the truck.
This came to mind because of something we talked about here once before. There was a truck that used to attend the VPW Rally that had two piece lock rings. I do not remember if the lock rings were split or one-piece, but there was an inner low profile intermediate ring that mated to the wheel and another low profile larger diameter ring that mated to the first. Together the assembly had about the same overall OD as the tall profile 6.5 lock ring, but the two individual pieces each kind of looked like the short profile 5.5 lock ring. I do not remember if the wheels were 5.5 or 6.5, but the whole assembly appeared like it may have been designed to adapt 9.00X16 tires to a 5.5 wheel. It looked like a factory Budd assembly, but may have been aftermarket from another source.
Junior
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