E30 Stance - Steel wheels or modern wheels??

E30 wheels is a magnificent topic of discussion, so lets have a couple of different takes on wheels for the old 3er...

By far the most common wheels to bestride the E30 are cross-wire / BBS styles. and beyond that owners tend to stick to solid period styled alloy wheels like Azev-A five-spokes or Borbet C. Personally I think the old-school BMs look best with steel-wheels such as the almighty Weller competition wheels, as in the pic above, especially with a lowered car. These are built for heavy-duty dirt-track racing and off-road and I think give a lowered E30 the best squat / rat look.

At the other end of the spectrum, here are some ultra-modern Japanese-style alloys on a 325is. I am not 100% on who makes these, but they look very much like RAYS Volk or Rota wheels. You don't see many wearing rims like these, certainly not done well anyway, but why not? Sharp lines suit sharp lines and the 3-box shape combined with large modern alloys gives the E30 a very purposeful look and go-kart stance.

E21 316: Tyre stretch comparison.

This is for a mate who's bought some 17" BBS reps (Calibre Vintage) for his Mk4 Golf. As with my tyres, the Demon Tweeks guys recommended 45 profile for his wheel size. Im guessing this is for comfort, safety etc., but not with the amount of stretch in mind. The first pic shows my 16x9J wheel with a Yokohama 205/45 tyre. In my opinion this is just too big looks wise and takes over the look of the wheel. The second pic shows my second set of tyres, Toyo 195/40 profile. The difference it makes to looks is staggering, showing the rim off instead of hiding it. In my case the bigger tyre was jammed against my wheel-arch and made me cut more than I needed to when I got the lower profile 40s. 

Lower profiles are harder to find and the tyre sellers will probably say the 5% difference in tyre-wall won't make much difference in order to shift items they have in stock, but as you can see below the difference is actually huge. 

225/45

215/40

May as well be 225, profile same but 5mm less pitch-angle on either side.

E39 530d: Shock MOT Fail! - Tyres, drop-links and handbrake.

This is my third MOT since buying the car and the first time it has even come up with an advisory item, let alone a fail, but I guess it had to happen eventually. I took it back to Walsh Autos in Birkenhead who know me and are usually very fair, but I think the problem was the 5-series hadn't been washed in about 12 months and was absolutely caked with bird muck and grime. It looked like it had been standing under a tree for that time and the fresh tax-disc didn't help, so I guess the tester thought I was dragging her out to sell and was a bit harsh on the checks. The moral of the story here would be to always give the car a wash prior to an MOT so the car appears cherished.

The fail items were:

Both N/S Tyres tread too low - I went for top-of-the-range Nexen nBlue through work with our trade discount, which worked out at £50 each for 225/55/16. This was still slightly cheaper than the low-range Pirelli and Continental and had a much better spec - extra-load, higher-speed, quieter and with an eco-rating, so I let my usual tyre-snobbey slip and plumped for good budget ones. If cash had been tighter though, lower-range Nexen and the worringly named Achilles budgets could be had for as little as £32. Still, £100 for 2 tyres is still good, considering the price for one entry-level Pirelli at Kwik Fit is £124.50!

O/S Anti-Roll Bar Drop-Link rubber boot perished - It was the original and had begun to let dirt in, so I figured the N/S one wouldn't be far behind and replaced both. The N/S one appeared to have been replace a few years ago and was in good nick, but when it's a matched pair of something - shocks or top-mounts - it's best to renew both at the same time. This is a problem that would have been avoided had the previous owner replaced both, but I guess this is easy to say when doing the work myself and not leaving it at BMW after the MOT. The drop-links were £9 each, again through work, but can be bought for a similar price on eBay.

I won't be needing to put a guide up on how to do the front drop-links, as our mate Clint @ E21Build.com has already done one for his daily-driver E39 540i - http://www.e21build.com/2013/06/diy-changing-e39-front-swaybar-end-links.html. Also check out his awesome E21 3-series engine-swap and drift-car build and, of course, my E21 stance-car build - http://e21dub.blogspot.com.

O/S Parking-Brake efficiency little or no effort - I tightened up the handbrake last year, but it soon started to loosen off again. It's a heavy car, so the cables or inner brake-shoes will likely need replacing at some point. To get it through the test, I cranked the cables up a bit and adjusted the shoes as far as they would go, using the method in this older post - . That was a week ago,

O/S No. Plate Light not working - Turned out to be a 5W festoon type bulb, which I had a few of lying around, so didn't cost anything. Be careful when popping the lens out, it does not press in from the side with the recess, as that would be too obvious - it presses in from the opposite side!


The overall cost for the MOT repairs was £120, so not bad at all really. It was the tyres that cost the lion's share and without them this would have been very cheap indeed, but they had to come round eventually. Even so, the money I saved by doing the work at home speaks for itself - throwing the car into a dealership I estimate to have come to £400+

E21 316: Stance looking rather complete...

Squat, slammed, stanced, hellaflush, scrapin' and eating the modern metal for brekkies!

E21 316: New Low-Pro Tyres - Toyo T1R + Stretching Issues!

Thanks to finding a buyer for my ill-fitting Yokohamas so quickly I was able to buy another set of tyres this week without having too feel too guilty about how much I've spent on stance this last fortnight. Stance is what this car is all about though, so money should be the last thing causing me to compromise. You can't fight progress after all...


I got back to mulling over sizes and decided not to take any chances on buying tyres too big again and went a couple of sizes smaller on width as well as a lower profile. The 8-inch wide front wheels have now got 195/40 tyres, as opposed to 205/45. That 5% decrease in the tyre-wall is more pronounced than I figured, but they still just about went on with a couple of assistants pressing the sides in. Still no need for the butane / lighter trick or a 'bead-blaster', but boy are they stretched! I think we're pushing the boundaries of legality here [Offence Code 112].

No such luck with the 9-inch wide rear wheels. With the lower-profile sidewall, the slightly skinnier 215/40 I went for just don't quite reach the inner-rims enough to coax them on, as the 225/45 Yokos did. With the help of my work colleagues we tried the butane / lighter trick several times to no avail. Either the fuel/air mixture wasn't right or we were just plain doing it wrong, so after starting to smell melted rubber I gave in and decided to read up a bit more. One guy at work knows someone not too far away who has one of the all fabled 'bead-blaster' machines [explained here on TyreBayDirect.com], but as is so often the case he hasn't seen him for a while and it'll take a bit of notice to get hold of it. I don't like to hang around so, determined to get something done this weekend, began scanning the forums again to see if there was another trick I'd missed.

To my amazement there was - the 'bicycle inner-tube' gambit. This involves stretching a bicycle inner-tube round the wheel-rim and inflating it to create an airtight seal in the gap between the rim and tyre, deflating it as the tyre expands and finally sliding it out as the bead is reached. It sounds almost simple and to be honest it is. Unlike the butane / lighter method, which is very hit-and-miss when you don't know what you're doing, the inner-tube trick has a much steadier learning curve. You can see what's going on, gauge the pressure, find leaks easily and if the tube is going to pop out and break the seal it does so gently and with fair warning. With a bit of common sense anyone can handle a tyre popping off the rim at 40-odd psi, so this is by far the safest way to stretch tyres at home - I even managed it with a foot-pump, though I wouldn't like to do that again. It only took two proper attempts to get my first tyre on this way and, of course, there's zero chance of damaging a rim or melting rubber. Here's a great vid on Youtube of how easy it is - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzxHYEdA8Qo, and it really wouldn't take many tries to get it down that good. I got 3 inner-tubes from Halfords for £10, so even if you need a dozen practise goes it still costs less than paying someone.

It's best to keep the tube size close to wheel size, but a bit smaller to get a tight fit. For my 16" wheels I bought 14" tubes, but a guy on the forum that convinced me was using 12" tubes on 15" wheels, so a few inches smaller is fine it seems. Getting an airtight seal was the most difficult part, but once you get a few PSI in and the tyre begins to press onto the tube you're away - make sure the valve on the tube is well proud of the seal as it inflates. Deflating and sliding the tube clear without breaking the seal can be troublesome, but it is just trial-and-error needed to get this right and it doesn't take much. Even though my first try was a fail and popped the seal it still managed to fully seat the opposite-bead, which is something two of us couldn't do using the old suspending the tyre on axle-stands and jumping on the wheel trick, so this is a good, safe method to do that. On my successful attempt, I still got a bit of tube caught in the bead, which is still stuck in there and caused the tyre to need quite a bit of pressure to pop onto the rim over it - about 65psi in fact, thankfully as with the foot-pump my legs just couldn't make any more! Still, the skinny 215 is on and I would recommend this technique to anyone stretching tyres at home.

E21 316: The wrong tyres! Sold.

Wallace and Gromit are back, this time they've got the right trousers on, it's the tyres that are right out. They're just too hi-profile and are wreaking havoc amongst the villages wheel-arches. Yep, those wicked Yokohama Advan have had to come off again and go on to eBay, as the wheel-arch chewed 2 of them pretty badly and they can't be returned, but the damage is only in the tread so I figured someone would want them cheap. Bearing in mind they've only covered about 0.2 of a mile and are worth ~£500 new, I figured £300 would still be a good deal and it looks like I was right - I had a buyer on the first day of the auction and got damn close to my asking price. The latest set of tyres have ony cost me £280 anyway, so I've had more expensive screw-ups it must be said.

The new tyres I've bought are good-old Toyo Proxes T1R, a bit boring and predictable, but again it's tough to get matching tyres in the right sizes. I am sad to see the lovely semi-slick design of the Yokos go though, but they just don't make a 40 profile and Toyo do, the new ones are 195/40/16 for the 8J front and 215/40/16 for the 9J rear - it's going to be quite a stretch! Watch this space.

These really were some of the coolest road tyres I have ever seen, what a shame they're like big balloons, hopefully the new owner will get the benefit of all that grip with the Scooby Impreza he's putting them on.

E21 316: 8Js won't fit the front...

After all the hacking and cutting on the rear arch to only discover I needed smaller tyres, today I threw an 8J onto the front with 20mm spacers, as without they just hit the track-rod end and wont even sit flush, and I find that space is even more limited at this end.

With the lip pulled out this time by hand, then neatened up a little with the baseball-bat / metal-bar rolling trick, the big 45-profile tyres still contact the back of the arch.

When steered hard-right, the tyre rubs past the edge of the bumper and fender, so it had to be jacked to turn the wheel straight again. The tyre also bent the edge of the front-valance, cracking the fibreglass repair I did last summer. A good inch would need to be cut off the valance here and I'm not sure lower profile tyres alone will remedy this, so some will need chopping off anyway, best keep it to a minimum. Oh, and I must save up for those camber-plates!

E21 316: Making the 9Js fit the rear...

Summary of the bank-holiday weekends activities:

Pulled the N/S/R wheel-arch back out and cut it off.
Peeled back the inner-skin of the arch and cut about 4 inches off it.
Cut a notch out of either side of where the arch meets the bumper shut-line.

The outer rim of the arch is now way off the tyre, but I could see a black rubber mark further up inside the inner wheel-arch.

The car was now rolling with a driver in, but one test drive revealed that any bump causes rubbing and the rim of the tyre caught the sharp edge of the cut inner arch, which chewed it pretty bad.

I've made a lot of space up there, so before I start hacking away any more arch, I'm going to buy smaller, lower profile tyres, I think that is now clear.

E21 316: Deep beige BBS?

I'm planning on painting the new wheels in the same Peugeot Panama Beige I did the rims of the Melbers in, maybe having them powder-coated in time, but here's a quick test on one of the 9J with my remaining rattle-cans.

E21 316: Slight arch foul!

As you can see, the arch was sat on the tyre something awful with the 9" wide wheels at the back and the 225/45/16 rubber on...

A bit more arch persuasion...

Credit card clearance!

Or is it? The arch is still sitting on the tyre a little. The car just about rolls, but there's nowhere for the tyre to go either on a bump or with the weight of the driver...

It looks very flush and tidy, but something drastic will have to be done.

E21 316: Serious new rubber - Yokohama Advan Neova AD08!

I've been having a bit of trouble finding a suitable set of tyres to fit my staggered fat wheels. I want a nice stretch to them of course, but nothing too crazy so I decided on 205/45/16 for the 8" wide fronts and 225/45/16 for the 9" at the back. Trouble is there doesn't seem to be one manufacturer making the same model tyre in both these sizes. I had my heart set on Toyo T1, but could only get a 195-wide front tyre to match my 225 rear. Falken will do a 205 front, but only a 215 for the rear in the same style. It is legal to run different tyre types, but unis on the the back and omnis on the front wouldn't make for the prettiest stance, so I've been stuck with naked BBS reps and unable to sell on my 15" Melbers.

I finally got a purchase order through work and was able to access the STS tyre-database and found a couple of budget makes in the right sizes surprisingly, but these aren't what I want to be stretching on so I guess you have to pay a little more to get what you want. I found some Yokohama semi-slick 'track-day' tyres that come in just about any size, but they ain't cheap - here they are on Demon Tweeks, where they'll set you back just under £500 for 2 of each width. Of course, I got my discount through work and they ended up running me pennies over £300, quite a saving, though it's still a bit more than I was planning to spend. Still, the tyre problem is sorted and they're on their way.

Yokohama Advan Neova AD08, to give them their full title, are a bit of a JDM-heads wet dream, but make a pretty cool looking tyre and have a lot of rubber on the road. Not that I'll benefit from all that grip in the E21, but they are designed for the track so they're made of good stuff and should stretch on nicely!