Can wheels hubs be milled down?

[nando]

Nah, looks about the same as my current tire setup.

ok, well, the front of *that* particular car looks like total ass, but the wheels/tires aren't the cause..

[george graves]

You guys don't think the front looks bad? (I'm not being a smart ass - honest question)

[nando]

I think you could probably go up to 4-5 mm, but definitely not 10mm.

I don't think it looks bad at all. due to the shape of the car, it's going to be pretty much impossible for it not to stick out on the bottom if it's flush with the top.

[Stephen]

never heard of 10mm being taken off, maybe 3mm. If it were me, i would just pull fenders and camber them in slightly. Done.

[SA E30]

This is something I've been sitting thinking about for ages now. I want to mill down the faces of the schnitzers on my car, by 4-5mm...

Then I just went ahead and pulled the fenders for lack of agrivation, and fitted wider wheels to the rear and pulled them.

(e36 front, e30 m3 rear suspension hybrid)

For what it's worth it appears to have been possible to do, but I could do the body work for free and had to pay to get the wheels machined...

[Van Westervelt]

Yea - that's already been covered.

How much clearance is there though? Because if you shave 10mm of the pad, then you lose 10mm of space at the caliper.

[george graves]

Yea - that's already been covered.

[Van Westervelt]

And brake caliper clearance on the weaves with fresh pads in e36 M fist calipers...

[Brandon12V]

you'll have another issue too, sir. Even you get them milled down(safely), you still have to consider how far you can go inward without the wheel hitting the strut housing.

[MC Hammered]

It can be done it there is enough material in the hub to do the modification.

I have two friends that bought HRE wheels that needed modifcation to make them fit, when looking at the hub there ware about 2"/56mm of exposed hub to work with. One had 10mm and the other 13mm of hub material cut off to make them fit and clear the brake caliper.

Not all shops can do the work so make sure they can reverse mount the wheel on their CNC mill/lathe without damaging the face.

But can it be done with the wheels you have in question? You will have to do some measuring of the hub thickness to see if there is enough material.

[Van Westervelt]

If you are to fill and re-drill, you could do the same in theory and bring the lug hole faces out to the face of the wheel by 'x' amount. 'x' also being the amount you milled off the back surface bad. You essentially are just pulling/pushing (if you use any modeling software) to get the offset you want, without losing the strength of the lug holes.

[shEck3lls0]

^^ agreed. Its not bad at all. Maybe roll the fenders alittle. And lose the volvo lip. Or at least trim it. Looks 10x better.

[thedeal]

I like it, keep it that way.

[straight6pwr]

just had a set of style 5s in my hands with your same question in mind. it looked like there was only 8mm or so of actual material back there to start with (not enough to remove much, probably not worth it for the 1-2mm)

this is, of course, assuming it would actually be safe to do so (do not have that knowledge)

[george graves]

Next time if you want only people with empirical knowledge of the topic, state it in your post.

I don't think it's rude of me to tell the drunk guy that doesn't know what a mill is to shove off. Don't be insulted - it's nothing personal. Glad you were having a beer. :)

[SIZE=1]The problem would be where the bolt holes are.

Ahhh.. So that might be it...Look at some images online that pad is much thinner than I expected it to be. Odd. I always thought of it as a larger chunk of worthless metal that was there to create the offset. But there really isn't nearly as much there as you would expect.

But really the easiest and safest way is to get camber plates and run a few degrees more camber and get better handling at the same time.

Easy yes, but I'm not a fan of how much wheel is hanging out the bottem of the fender. It's not the look I'm going for.

George, is there room for the backside of the spokes of the wheel to get closer to the caliper? That is usually a tight spot and thinning the hub will decrease that clearance by an equal amount.

Very good question. That might be a 2nd deal breaker.