Hey guys,

I just purchased a 5at G35 coupe and it came with 18" BBS wheels. It came with OEM brembo calipers/rotors as well. I purchased some OEM 18's today and I tried installing them but the OEM lugs are much too short to fit the bolts on the rotors. The rears fit fine however

The front BBS wheels included a spacer which essentially shortented the length of the bolts on the rotos so the lugs fit over the BBS wheels but wont fit on the OEM 18s. Is there any reason for this? Do I simply need different lugs?

Again my car is a 5speed automatic with the OEM Brembo calipers. Are the bolts on the rotors longer on the front Brembo rotors?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!

 

I'm thinking there are extended studs on the fronts, which is why OEM lugs won't work.

 

^^ Thanks I think they are extended studs. I just ordered some open ended lug nuts to fix the issue. Thanks for your help!

 

 

I have a sort of similar problem with my aftermarket wheels (concave 20' all round with 8.5' +15 fronts and 10' +30 rears). Before these were another set of aftermarket wheels (18' 8.5' and offset all round) and they fit fine with the lugs that came with it.

The lugs on my current rears sit fine and flush with the face of wheels as per usual you see OEM wheel cars, but my current fronts for some reason have very deep sockets and the lugs that came with it sit really deep. The lugs are all the same size of approximately 33-35mm in height. I measured the depth of the socket with the lugs on to be about 60-65mm.

My dilemma is that I'm trying to find lugs that will sit flush with the fronts face and so far I can only find 60mm maximum in height. Also, another problem is that buying lugs only come in sets of 16 or 20 more commonly, whereas sets of 4 is very rare. Can someone help or point me in the right direction?

 

I believe the reason why your lugs are sitting so far inside the lug seat pockets is due to the thickness of the backpad. Wheel companies often times use the same mold for the face of the wheel and machine metal off of the backpad to determine the offset, so lower offset wheels have "more" backpad than higher offset wheels. This means that the lug position changes by offset, while the face remains the same. There's not really a whole lot you can do other than find extended lugs that might fill the gap.

 

Yeah I had a look and I do believe the thickness of the backpad is quite large... This is really disappointing from the manufacturer; poor offset design and lack of consideration for the lug nuts position... I mean the wheel design is concave, so why couldn't they have a concave or deeper concave face as the rears... It baffles me that they were lazy and forget about the front wheels...

I just so wish I took more time to consider and got the Weds SA55 instead... I guess its a lesson learned to look out for dodgy offset designs, but it's hard when buying online to inspect than as in person...

 

I wouldn't say it's laziness necessarily. Even companies like Rays Engineering do this. It is expensive to design different faces for each offset. It makes more sense just to machine more or less material off of the back pad in order to achieve the proper sizing. That's why a lot of wheels only have two or three face types but more than two or three offsets for the given widths.